When the forest animal cries, Robi Costa answers

Deep into the night, when the villages around the forests of Habiganj have gone quiet, Robi Costa listens.

An unusual cry from the forest can be enough to get him out of bed. To most people, it might sound like an animal calling in the darkness. Robi has spent enough time in these forests to sometimes hear something else…distress.

He picks up a flashlight and whatever equipment he may need and heads out.

Sometimes, he finds an animal wounded by a hunter. Sometimes it is a bird with a wing broken in a storm. On other occasions, the call comes not from the forest but from a frightened household where a snake has appeared and residents are preparing to kill it.

For roughly 15 years, this has been a defining part of Robi's life.

The 40-year-old resident of Daragaon in Bahubal upazila of Habiganj says he has rescued around 2,500 wild animals, birds and snakes during that period, without a salary, a formal rescue centre or sophisticated medical equipment.

His modest home, near the tea gardens where he grew up, has gradually become an informal shelter for injured wildlife.

Barking deer, monkeys, slow lorises, capped langurs, pangolins, civets, leopard cats, fishing cats and junglefowl are among the animals he says have passed through his hands.

He cares for injured animals until they are strong enough to survive again in the wild. The latest occupants of his improvised refuge are two snakes…an oriental rat snake and a monocled cobra.

A childhood spent following sounds

Robi's relationship with the forest began long before he thought of himself as a wildlife rescuer.

Around 2000, while his parents worked plucking leaves in a tea garden, he would slip away into the nearby forest.

“I used to follow bird calls,” he told Daily Waadaa and rustling in the undergrowth, sometimes wandering so far that he lost his way. “I could spend hours watching animals and listening to unfamiliar sounds.”

The forest became familiar territory.

As he grew older, curiosity turned into something closer to responsibility. At first, when Robi found an injured animal, he would provide whatever basic treatment he could and release it.

In 2011, he began bringing seriously injured or sick animals home. There was no clinic to receive them. There still isn't.

What he had was experience accumulated over years in the forest and a willingness to spend his own limited money on food and treatment.

Robi is the only child of tea worker Dilip Costa. He lives with his wife and two children, and the family is not affluent. Yet the expenses involved in rescuing wildlife have become part of his life.

To him, he said, an injured animal is first of all a life that needs help.

"Whenever a wild animal is in danger, I become restless," Robi told Waadaa. "When I hear their cries, I can't hold myself back. Even if it is the middle of the night, I am startled into action."

Sometimes, he said, he reaches the forest to find an animal writhing after being attacked by a hunter.

"At that point, I don't think about anything else," he said. "I just rescue it and bring it home."

Teaching people not to kill

Some of Robi's most frequent interventions involve an animal many people would rather see dead: snakes.

When one enters a house, panic can quickly turn into an attempt to beat it to death. Residents in the area have increasingly learned to call Robi instead.

He catches the snake, removes it from the property and eventually hands it over to the Forest Department.

Mahmud Hossain, Habiganj range officer of the Wildlife Management and Nature Conservation Department, told Waadaa that residents sometimes offer Robi money for rescuing snakes from their homes.

Robi generally refuses. His work, however, is as much about changing human behaviour as rescuing individual animals.

Fear is understandable, he believes. Killing an animal simply because it inspires fear is not. "I want a relationship of compassion to develop between animals and people," Robi said. "People should not kill animals simply because they are frightened or panicked."

He wants people to recognise something more basic: "They have a right to live, too."

That conviction has given his small home in Daragaon an unusual place in the surrounding community. People arrive carrying injured birds. Others call about snakes. News of an animal wounded by hunters can send Robi into the forest after dark.

“When the animal recovers, there is one final task…” Robi smiled…”Taking it back to where it belongs.”

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