Craig Dickmann, a 54-year-old wildlife ranger, decided to spend the weekend fishing in a remote part of Northern Australia known as the “crocodile country.” As it turned out, a toothy “fan” of almost three meters long watched the man, who was about to leave the beach and suddenly attacked him.
“When I turned to leave, the first thing I saw was a huge reptile head and it just hit me,” he told reporters from his hospital bed in Cairns, Queensland.
The crocodile tried to drag the victim under water but at some moment the ranger suddenly realized he needed to put a thumb in its eye - this was the only soft spot that he found on the “bulletproof” animal.
He pressed on the eye until he felt a bone under it, the reptile weakened his grip and Dickmann managed not only to break free, but then saddled it and even clenched its jaw. But the situation still remained critical, so the caretaker pushed the insidious predator with all his might and it preferred to slip back into the water.
“I was attacked by some particularly cunning specimen,” says a seasoned wildlife ranger. “This noise will haunt me forever, and I think I will never forget the sound of its snapping jaws.”
The ranger got a lot of injuries on the skin on his arms and, he hardly got to the house and was immediately hospitalized. Now nothing is threatening his life but the employees of the Queensland Environment Department have already tracked down and executed the treacherous reptile.
The department calls the population for vigilance while visiting the "country of crocodiles." Their numbers here increased sharply after they were almost completely exterminated and declared a protected species in the 1970s. At present, apparently, the size of the population of marine crocodiles in the tropical north of the vast Australian continent is approaching a reasonable limit. According to the state government, the last human attack was carried out by these reptiles in January of 2018 in the Torres Strait, and the fatalities occurred in October 2017 in Port Douglas.
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