Lewis Carroll - Winston Churchill - Steve Irwin - David Attenborough TV - Earth’s Natural Wonders TV - MonsterQuest TV -
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
Of every golden scale! Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
And neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws. ibid.
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. Winston Churchill, cited Readers’ Digest December 1954; The New York Times 21 January 1940 cited the speech as: ‘Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear greatly that the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar ever more loudly ever more widely.’
Take the crocodile, for example, my favourite animal. There are twenty-three species. Seventeen of those species are rare or endangered. They’re on the way out, no matter what anyone does or says, you know. Steve Irwin
From memory the crocodiles know the wildebeest are coming and lie in wait. David Attenborough, Planet Earth: Freshwater, BBC 2006
The Nile Crocodile – five metres long, seven hundred kilos and very hungry. His last square meal was nearly a year ago. David Attenborough, The Hunt I: The Hardest Challenge, BBC 2015
Australia … along its rugged [northern] coastline runs a remarkable eco-system … home to one of the most aggressive of all predators: the saltwalter crocodile, measure up to six metres in length and weighing as much as a ton … Their descendants still use traditional skills to collect crog eggs, risking their lives in the process. Earth’s Natural Wonders II: Surviving With Animals, BBC 2018
An exhaustive search to find a modern super-croc … It doesn’t take long for them to encounter their first crocodiles. MonsterQuest s3e17: Super-Crocodiles, History 2009