How Big Is An Estuarine Crocodile From Borneo?

About to undertake an overfly jungle recce in Borneo from a Scout helicopter, 1980s.

Lots of ideas when you speak to people who know the jungle, about what is the most dangerous animal under the canopy. My own thoughts are that it’s the big white male boar tusker. However, many will say it’s the estuarine crocodile.

During my many years in and out of the Borneo jungle, both have killed local people.

However, as protected that these animals must be with the little that’s left of the jungle, I’m still not sure exactly how big the crocodiles get when fully mature?

Here are a handful of stories of the estuarine crocodile, and some with my part in it. Horrendous to lighthearted…here we go:

The first being when I spent 2 years at the jungle warfare school in Brunei with my family. We had visited the local market to buy some veggies. Beforehand we walked to the slipway leading down to the river’s estuary on the coastline. Women were doing their washing on stones, and small children were playing around them. It was fun seeing the locals living life so simply.

Later in the afternoon, we were back in the area to have dinner. A local told us that an estuarine crocodile had rushed a small child playing on the slipway, and dragged them off and into the water, twisting and turning viciously until not seen again. We never found out if the child’s body or the crocodile was ever found.

Another episode was when I went on a helicopter recce with a pilot friend to look for an area to place a new jungle camp for a training course. It was always fun, flying low up the major rivers, hanging in the hover position at canopy level to look at the thousands of fruit bats hanging upside down from the tree branches, and just generally looking for natural places where taking down as few trees as possible would make a great helicopter landing site for the new training camp. On the return flight we spotted an estuarine crocodile on the banks of the lower tidal reaches of a major river (salt/semi salt water). It was huge, and looked like it was feasting on a goat that had strayed from a small farming community. The pilot slowly hovered over the crocodile, and the head to tail was longer than the helicopter! I just wish back then that I was into my photography as I am now.

Lastly, I was in a two man Klepper canoe years before the two aforementioned stories, harbouring up for the evening in king tides on our way to carry out an enemy camp recce. The river and coastal waters being 20 feet higher than shown on the charts of that period. We spent all night with our canoe swaying in the water as large crocodiles fought for local supremacy. Due to the king tides, that occur every four years, the estuarine crocodiles had come way further up stream than normal.

My partner in the canoe asked how big I thought they were. I took my torch out and ran it over the area where the thrashing and splashing was taking place next to the canoe. When I ran the torch beam from the crocodile’s head down towards it’s tail…the batteries ran out.

That’s how big it was!