Teenager artificially incubates four eggs of Common Trinket

Aurangabad: A city-based teenager has successfully managed to artificially incubate four eggs abandoned by a Common Trinket.

Meet Sarthak Agrawal who with the help of his

mentor

accomplished this daunting task. The mother

snake

was caught from the city limits couple of months ago.

“Before the mother snake was released into the forest, she had laid four eggs in the jar she was kept in. While the Common Trinket snakes, by instinct, do not take care of their eggs and abandon them, we had an uphill task ahead to incubate the eggs artificially. I am glad that I could do it successfully,” Sarthak told ToI on Saturday.

Environmentalist Kishor Pathak — a certified snake catcher — had caught the snake from Shivaji Nagar. “As I could not take care of the eggs due to some personal issues, I handed them to Sarthak who has been associated with us for a long time. I had the belief that he can shoulder the responsibility, which he did,” said Pathak.

Recalling all the care he had taken, Sarthak said he was literally obsessed with it. “The immediate challenge was to keep the eggs between 25 and 29 degrees celsius during the winter season. I had arranged for a large plastic box and filled it with sand at the bottom. A thick layer of dry leaves made on the sand served as cushion for eggs with required temperature,” he said.

To maintain the desired moisture level, Sarthak poured hot water on the sand basement using syringes. “I couldn’t sleep in the night with thoughts of missing the hatching. Couple of days ago, I came from college and peeped into container that had eggs. All of a sudden, my heart started pounding to see one snake already out of the egg and the other pushing hard to come out,” he recalled.

“Within a span of few minutes, all the four eggs had hatched. I was overjoyed with the whole experience,” Sarthak said.

The successful incubation of snake eggs has spread joy among local animal lovers who congratulated Sarthak for his efforts. The two-day-old snakes were released into forest by Pathak and his team on Saturday evening.