The Burmese python was hungry and rather active when the police arrived. Released into the wild, the exotic pet snake had grown thin and was covered in burn marks from curling around a naked lightbulb, desperate for heat, writes Amanda Castleman.

"It was quite lively," explains Pc Simon Towers. "A woman found it, took it home and put it in a box. She didn't know what it was.

"Most calls are just about grass snakes. No matter how you ask people to describe a snake over the phone, they always think it's an adder. But this one was a bit different," he chuckles.

Wildlife liaison officers see it all - abandoned pythons, hare-coursing, lizard smuggling, egg theft and badger-baiting. And the public has been introduced to their work through the popular BBC television series Badger, which stars former Soldier, Soldier actor Jerome Flynn. Closer to home, three local beat bobbies - Simon Towers, Ray Hamilton and Colin Robey - alternate between protecting man, beast and plants.

"There's a growing problem with exotic pets," Pc Towers says. "Tortoises in particular."

Surely not. Must be a rather slow trade.

He shakes his head, and gently disagrees: "One hundred tortoises were stolen recently in the north of England. Some are very rare, collectable and expensive. A small Herman costs about £150 and a Spurthied is probably more.

"One of our jobs involves making sure that pet shops are buying legally. All sorts of amphibians and reptiles are smuggled into the country - birds' eggs too."

The urban legends about lizards stuffed down smugglers' trousers are rarely true. Pc Towers says that most come into Britain in mislabelled boxes, not boxers.

"The exotics are the hardest cases in a way. You're out on your own. With birds of prey, for example, you can call on local handlers for help. You need to be careful, because the wrong treatment can kill a bird - a bird that's worth thousands of pounds." The county is home mostly to kestrels, red kites and the less decorative buzzards, but other species are gaining airspace. "One of the job's joys is seeing a barn owl in the early hours of the morning," he says. "I don't think the people who live here realise Nature's richness. They just go past it every day, but the wildlife is out there."

Yet many of those animals could wind up indoors, glass-eyed and rigid. Last year a national operation cracked down on illegal taxidermy. Oxfordshire animals were shipped to Yorkshire, preserved and sold. "If a roadkill is a local animal it can be stuffed, but there was a suspicious number of roadkills ocurring. It turned out the taxidermist had a lion in his freezer - I don't know where he got that one," he laughs. The officers' concerns are more likely to originate in the Cotswold hills than the Serengeti, however. "Snares and deer poaching can get pretty nasty. We work hand in hand with the gamekeepers of the large estates such as Cornbury, Ditchley and Blenheim. They are our eyes and ears."

During the poaching season, the officers often change shifts, working until 4am to catch late-night criminals. "The big thing now is hare-coursing, though," Pc Towers explains. "Greyhounds or lurchers leap out of a car and hunt hares down. A lot of money changes hands illegally on betting.

"It's difficult to catch them. They move from field to field. But this isn't simply a local problem. People come from all over - the Midlands, Wales and Lincolnshire - for our brown hares." A Thames Valley Police leaflet warns: "The hare-coursing fraternity contains a number of criminals, who, because of the high-stake illegal gambling, can be extremely violent, particularly towards landowners and police.

"Dealing with the problem often requires a great amount of resources and needs to be intelligence-led." That means descriptions of people and vehicles rung in by residents.

Pc Towers encourages com- munication. He says: "People need to be more aware that we're here, willing to investigate and get to the bottom of problems. Wildlife crime is out there.

"People shouldn't be afraid to report suspicious incidents," he adds.

Animal or not, the wildlife officers are happy to help. Their vigilance was recently stepped up after reports that bulb rustlers have been clearing churchyards and woods of wildflowers and selling them to unscrupulous garden centres. Recently, two men were jailed for stealing 300,000 bulbs, worth £60,000, from a wood in Hertfordshire. Pc Towers adds: "Plants aren't talked about so much, but they are important. Once an orchid is gone from the wild, it's gone for good. That's as much theft as shoplifting.

"Most people don't know that road verges are designated as nature reserves for rare plants."

This is the warm, fuzzy face of policing. The cops who care are on the beat protecting the daisies and the deer. And the Burmese python, of course. From a starved and burned waif, she has been transformed into a lush coil by the officer who adopted her. He even bought her a companion.

"She has a boyfriend now and is happy," Pc Towers says.

Who says you can't buy love?

Story date: Friday 11 February

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.