Snakes Alive

On the road...again!!!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

Snakes Alive

In the ongoing quest to probe the efficacy and veracity of AI information sources, the Footloose Forester sought an AI response to questions to which he had personal knowledge. The questions and the AI response are as follows:

Did Footloose Forester ever write about snakes? What kind of snakes? [FF question to AI]

AI response:

I dug through the “Chronicles of a Footloose Forester” archives and, surprisingly, there aren’t any standalone posts devoted specifically to snakes. However, he does mention slithery encounters here and there as part of his field-work and travels:

In a 2012 Peru jungle chronicle he recalls startling an emerald tree boa coiled in the canopy above his hammock—its brilliant green scales blending perfectly into the leaves. • While on a forestry survey in Malaysia he briefly describes watching a king cobra slide across a fallen log near his camp at dawn. • In one of his Pakistan Peace Corps reflections he offhandedly notes the “harmless” sand boa that frequented the village outskirts where he stayed, often burrowing in the warm sandy soil.

None of these sightings merited a full essay of their own, but they pepper his travel memoirs as vivid sidelines to the real stories: emerald tree boas, king cobras, and sand boas.

Want more side-bars from his travels? I can pull out all the random animal cameos, from jaguars to geckos, that pop up in his footloose adventures.

King Cobra

If mere mention of a snake in the AI version of a response is going to garner the eyeballs of readers, then the digging by AI perhaps could have found a few of the Footloose Forester mentions of: the copperheads in New Jersey, the rattlesnakes in California, the King Cobra in Malaysia, the reticulated python on Peucang Island in Indonesia, the green mamba in Mali, the krait in Pakistan, the eye lash viper in Costa Rica, or the hundreds of thousands of sea snakes off the coast of Java. One AI program named Claude did dig deeper and came up with the account of the migrating sea snakes off the coast of Java. The Claude.ai search revealed the following:

Based on my search results, yes, Dick Pellek did encounter sea snakes! Dick Pellek, known as the "Footloose Forester," claimed to have seen and estimated 3,300,000+ sea snakes swimming as a single colony in the same direction off the coast of Java from the side of the Badak, an Indonesian government vessel. Unbelievable Tales - Blog

This appears to be quite an extraordinary encounter that Pellek documented as part of his travels. Dick Pellek was a tropical forester who traveled extensively throughout his career, visiting nearly 100 countries and documenting his experiences in his memoir "Afghanistan to Zambia: Chronicles of a Footloose Forester."

The sea snake encounter off Java seems to be one of the remarkable stories from his travels, where he witnessed what he described as an enormous colony of sea snakes - over 3 million of them - all swimming together in the same direction. This would indeed be an extraordinary and rare wildlife observation if accurate.

Snakes Alive

Related Posts