Wildlife History – The blog of author Luke Phillips

In July 1974 an elderly Swiss baron walked into the hills of Komodo and did not come out. What we chose to believe about his death says more about us than about the dragons.

High on a ridge on the island of Komodo there stands a small cross. The inscription is plain enough — he loved Nature throughout his life — and it marks the last known whereabouts of Baron Rudolf Reding von Biberegg, a Swiss aristocrat in his seventies who, on a July morning in 1974, went walking among the largest lizards on Earth and was never seen again.

The bones of the story are these. Von Reding was part of a small tourist party that had sailed across from Flores to see the dragons in the flesh. By one account the group had spent the morning enticing the animals with a goat carcass, the better to watch them feed, before the baron peeled away to make his own way back to the boat. By another, he stumbled and hurt his knee on the trail, and his guide left him where he sat to go and fetch help. The two versions agree on what mattered. When the party returned, the baron was gone. More than a hundred people combed the island over the following day. Miles from the path, high in the hills, they found his glasses and his smashed camera. Nothing else — no baron, no body, not a scrap. He is remembered as the first European ever devoured by a Komodo dragon.

It’s that word European that ought to catch in the throat.

The counted and the uncounted

Von Reding was not the first person taken by a dragon on Komodo. He could not possibly have been. People have lived alongside these animals for as long as there have been people on these islands, and the accommodations they make tell you everything. Villagers on Komodo and Rinca do not wander into the grasslands alone. For generations they threw the old, toothless dragons the heads and hides of butchered deer — a kind of tribute, a peace kept by feeding the very thing that might otherwise feed on them. You do not build those habits around an animal you consider harmless. You build them around one that has, within living memory and long before it, killed people you knew.

None of those people got a cross on a ridge. None of them got a line in the Washington Post. They died, if they died, uncounted and unrecorded, and the tally that Western readers know — the handful of tourist-era deaths and maulings logged since 1974 — begins precisely at the moment a titled European joined the list. Von Reding is famous not because his death was the worst or the first, but because his was the death that got written down. The dragons had been man-eaters all along. We simply hadn’t been paying attention to the funerals that came before, and most of the ones that came after.

We thought we could pet them

To understand how a whole hemisphere managed to overlook this, you have to go back to a photograph.

In 1927 the first two live Komodo dragons in Europe arrived at London Zoo, into a purpose-built Reptile House designed by Joan Beauchamp Procter — the zoo’s first female Curator of Reptiles, a woman of formidable talent and fragile health who would be dead within four years, at thirty-four. Procter took one of the dragons, Sumbawa, entirely to heart. She walked it around the grounds like a dog, occasionally steering the two-metre lizard by its tail, and in 1928 she scandalised a Scientific Meeting by bringing it along to eat chicken and eggs from her hand while she stroked its head, all to prove the beast was no monster. There is a photograph, published in one of her own papers, of Sumbawa beside a small child who is patting it on the head as one might a Labrador.

This was the settled Western picture of the Komodo dragon for the better part of the twentieth century: a torpid, obliging curiosity, slow and rather lazy, safely behind glass or, if you were Joan Procter, on the end of a lead. It was a picture built almost entirely from captives — sick, sluggish, half the size they reach in the wild — and from the theatrical mythmaking that had named them in the first place. The very phrase “Komodo dragon” was a piece of showmanship coined by an American expedition in the twenties whose specimens helped inspire King Kong. We invented a dragon for the cinema and then, having got a good look at the real thing dozing in a zoo, decided it wasn’t so fearsome after all. Both pictures were wrong. Neither had much to do with the animal that hunted the hills of Komodo.

Everything we didn’t know we didn’t know

Here is the genuinely humbling part. The most basic facts about how this animal makes more of itself, and how it kills, are more recent than most of the people reading this.

Take reproduction. In 2006 keepers at Chester Zoo watched a female called Flora — who had never so much as met a male — lay a clutch of fertile eggs. The same year, a London dragon named Sungai did the same, and the two cases were written up together in Nature. Female Komodo dragons, it turns out, can reproduce alone, through parthenogenesis, and the offspring they produce this way are all male, which means a single female washed up on an empty island could in principle lay eggs, raise mates from her own hatchlings, and found a whole population from scratch. Chester’s Kevin Buley reached, almost word for word, for the line Ian Malcolm delivers in Jurassic Park: it is, he said, nature finding a way. A film about resurrected reptiles breeding when they were never supposed to had beaten reality to the punch by thirteen years.

Then there’s the bite. For decades the received wisdom held that a Komodo dragon’s mouth was simply so thick with septic bacteria that a single bite doomed its victim to die of blood poisoning days later, the dragon ambling along behind to collect the body. It’s a wonderfully grim story, and it’s largely wrong. In 2009 a team led by Bryan Fry identified genuine venom glands in the lower jaw — the toxins drop blood pressure and prevent clotting, so the prey bleeds and slides toward shock. Later work went further and questioned whether the mouth was even especially dirty to begin with. So the science of how this animal actually reproduces, and how it actually kills, is younger than a blockbuster from 1993. We were letting toddlers pat them on the head decades before we had the first clue what we were looking at.

And we did not even know, until relatively recently, that they can swim — strongly, between islands, diving several metres down.

Back to the ridge

Which brings us back to the baron, and to the theory, still politely offered, that no dragon was involved at all. He was old, the argument runs, and unwell; perhaps he simply died out there, or met with more ordinary human misfortune, and the reptiles are merely convenient.

I don’t buy it, and I don’t think the evidence asks us to. That theory is a fossil of 1974 — a relic of exactly the misjudgement this whole story is about. It comes from a decade that thought these animals were slow, lazy zoo-pieces; that had never heard of their venom; that did not know a startled clutch of tree-dwelling juveniles, bolting for the branches to avoid being eaten by their own elders, might send a nervous old man stumbling off the path and straight into the territory of the larger, patient, opportunistic adults; that did not even credit the beasts with the ability to swim. Set the dismissal against what we now know, and it is the dismissal, not the dragon, that looks like the wild assumption.

An elderly man, injured or frightened, alone and immobile in the hills — that is not a puzzle to a Komodo dragon. That is an invitation. His glasses and his broken camera, and nothing else at all, is not the scene of a quiet natural death. It is the signature of an animal that eats bone, hide and hoof and leaves almost nothing behind. We will never be certain, because there was nothing left to be certain with. But on the balance of everything we have learned in the fifty years since — most of which the men who shrugged at his disappearance did not know — the baron who loved Nature throughout his life was very likely taken by it.

The cross on the ridge gets that much right. It just doesn’t say by what.

In the winter of 1915, the settlement of Sankebetsu, in northern Japan, was already under strain.

Snow lay deep across Hokkaido. Food stores were thin. Travel was difficult, sometimes impossible. For the people living at the margins of cultivated land, winter was not simply a season — it was a test of endurance.

What went largely unconsidered was that the same conditions applied to everything beyond the settlement’s boundaries.

The forests were locked in ice. Natural forage was scarce. Prey animals were weakened, dispersed, or absent altogether. The winter that pressed hardest on human communities was doing the same to the wildlife around them. But at the time, this was not a connection people were trained to make.

Ecology, as a way of thinking, had not yet entered the conversation. Hardship was viewed as a human problem, unfolding against a largely static natural backdrop. The idea that animals might also be responding — adapting, learning, and changing behaviour under pressure, was rarely entertained.

It was in this context that the Sankebetsu incident began.

A first encounter and a dangerous assumption

The bear’s first appearance was not dramatic in scale, but it was decisive in consequence. In December 1915, a large brown bear entered the settlement and attacked a woman working near her home. The encounter was sudden and close-quarters. She was killed before any effective intervention could be made.

The bear did not linger. After the attack, it retreated back into the surrounding forest.

That withdrawal shaped how the incident was understood.

Within the settlement, the prevailing belief was that the animal had been startled — that the violence was reactive, not intentional, and that the danger had passed with the bear’s departure. The incident was treated as an isolated tragedy rather than the opening stage of a larger threat.

No co-ordinated hunt followed. No sustained effort was made to track the animal’s movements or assess whether it might return.

This response was not careless so much as culturally conditioned. At the time, apex predators were often viewed as opportunistic but fundamentally avoidant of humans. An animal that fled was assumed to have learned fear.

But this assumption rested on a misunderstanding of how predators learn.

An animal that kills and escapes unharmed has not seen that behaviour punished. It has been reinforced. The boundary between human and prey does not harden, it weakens.

In retrospect, the bear’s retreat was not a conclusion. It was a pause.

Escalation isn’t chaos, it’s pattern

When the bear returned, it did not behave erratically.

It came back into the settlement repeatedly, moving with increasing confidence through spaces that had already been shaped by human presence. Homes were entered. People were taken from places that should have been safe.

One of the most disturbing moments came shortly after the initial attack, when the bear returned during a funeral held for the first victim. Drawn by human activity and the presence of food, it entered the area and killed mourners gathered there.

The violence was no longer confined to a single encounter. Over the course of one night, multiple people were killed in separate attacks. By the time the bear was finally stopped, five lives had been lost, several of them within hours of one another.

What is striking, in retrospect, is not the scale of the violence, but its consistency.

The bear did not flee after these encounters. It did not act randomly. It returned to the same settlement, exploited moments of vulnerability, and withdrew only when challenged. Each successful attack reinforced the same lesson: humans were accessible, and resistance was minimal.

This is the point at which many retellings introduce the language of madness or bloodlust. But escalation, in cases like this, is rarely chaotic. It is patterned.

Under conditions of prolonged scarcity, the bear’s behaviour reflected learning rather than frenzy. What appeared to the community as senseless violence followed a grim internal logic shaped by hunger, opportunity, and success.

Human hesitation, and a belated resolution

As fear spread through the settlement, so did uncertainty.

There was disagreement over whether the same bear was responsible for each attack. Some believed the animal would eventually move on. Others feared that a co-ordinated response might provoke further violence. Time was lost to debate, hesitation, and the difficulty of acting decisively in extreme winter conditions.

When a concerted effort was finally made to track the bear, it revealed just how unprepared the community was for such a task. Weather obscured trails. Knowledge of bear behaviour was inconsistent, drawn from folklore, fragments of experience, and assumption rather than strategy.

Eventually, a group of hunters succeeded in locating and killing the animal. The bear was identified as a large male brown bear, in poor physical condition. Its body showed signs consistent with prolonged scarcity. With its death, the attacks stopped.

The immediate danger to Sankebetsu was over.

But the resolution came only after multiple lives had been lost, and only once the cost of inaction had become undeniable. The bear’s death did not mark the defeat of a monster, but the delayed recognition of a threat that had been misunderstood from the outset.

Then, and now

More than a century after the Sankebetsu incident, it is tempting to look for repetition — to imagine the same landscape quietly replaying its past.

That is not what the evidence suggests.

Brown bears still inhabit Hokkaido today. The species persists across much of the island’s forests and mountain ranges, and in some areas populations are thought to be stable or recovering after decades of decline. The region where Sankebetsu once stood is no longer a permanent settlement, and there is no indication that it has become a modern centre for serious bear attacks.

History, in this sense, is not repeating itself geographically.

What has changed is the broader context in which people and bears now coexist.

In 2025, Japan recorded 13 human fatalities and more than 100 injuries resulting from bear encounters, involving both Asiatic brown bears and Asiatic black bears. These incidents were spread across multiple prefectures and environments — from rural settlements to the edges of towns — rather than concentrated in any single location.

The pressures behind them are familiar: reduced natural food availability, changing land use, and expanding human presence in areas once less frequently occupied. Bears range more widely when resources are scarce, and humans now occupy landscapes that were once seasonal or marginal.

The relevance of Sankebetsu, then, is not that it is happening again in the same place. It is that the same ecological forces – scarcity, overlap, and hesitation, all continue to shape encounters between people and large predators, wherever clear boundaries erode.

The quieter truth of man-eater stories

The Sankebetsu bear was not a creature of myth, nor a symbol of evil. It was an animal responding to scarcity, learning from success, and moving through a landscape that no longer offered clear separation between forest and home.

Man-eater stories endure not because they reveal something monstrous about animals, but because they expose a recurring human blind spot: the tendency to see nature as static, until it reacts.

When prey disappears, boundaries blur. When boundaries blur, conflict follows.

The question is not whether such stories will happen again, but whether we recognise the conditions early enough to change the outcome.

Tag: Wildlife History

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