James Ashe Antivenom Trust

The patchy weather we are having - cold and rainy one day, sunny and brisk the next - is really bringing out the snakes.

Down at his end of Watamu, Royjan and staff are called to rescue or collect approximately one snake a day. At this end we have not had quite so many calls, but it is several a week. The last 24 hours have excelled themselves.

Yesterday evening I collected a medium sized File Snake that had just eaten something, possibly a toad, on a well-watered hotel lawn.

Cape File Snake (photo by Anthony Childs)

Early this morning we were contacted by an excited and overheated young man to come get a “really big” python from near the beach somewhere off the end of the tarmac road. I did not feel ready for a long trek so I gave a lift to the end of the tarmac to the young man and to our foreman, Boniface, who is particularly good at handling African Rock Pythons.

I then left them to it; thank goodness, because I had left the house forgetting I had a pot with enough water for a cup of coffee on the stove and it had boiled dry by the time I got home! Not all dangers are in the bush!

Boniface got back very upset, and he remained agitated for the rest of the day. It had indeed been a very large python…..but it had been killed 3 days ago.

Our young informant had been too scared to get too close in the first place and had not realised it was dead and bloated, so looked even bigger than normal. What a great shame!

Link-Marked Sand Snake (photo by Anthony Childs)

Boni had another call not much later to go across the road where he collected a small Link-Marked Sand Snake. It did not really make up for the loss of such a prize-size python, especially as our python house at Bio-Ken Snake Farm has been newly redecorated with murals of thorn trees and would have made the python a wonderful home!

I am sporting a sticking plaster on my finger - my just desserts for an untidy capture.

I got an excited telephone call from my neighbour to tell me that there was a huge python in her garden, asking if I would come to collect the snake immediately. She assured me I would not be attacked by her herd of German Shepherds, who had all been shut away for their own safety.

I woke Ferry, our young top snake catcher. Together, armed only with torches, a towel and a big box, we went round to the neighbour’s house.

By then, the python was seriously annoyed because the husband had been preventing it from escaping into the thickets in his garden by holding its tail whenever it turned to run. The snake was coiled in an angrily defensive heap, tail held in a little knot (a sure sign of agitation) and exuding the very pungent alarm smell typical of pythons.

I flipped the towel over its head, plunged down and grabbed at neck and tail. It was not nearly as big as my neighbour had thought but that is normally the case. It was certainly big enough to have made a meal of her latest beautiful 4 month old puppy!

Ferry unwrapped a coil which the python had put round my arm and together we lifted the snake into the box. The lid went on, but it went on the wrong way round, easy to do by torchlight and in the heat of the moment.

Ferry quickly turned the lid right side around, but not quite quickly enough. The head and neck of the furious python slithered out. I grabbed the snake and stuffed it back inside the box. When I accidentally got my other hand too close to its mouth, the python gave a sideways snap and dug two of its long teeth into the side of my finger.

The teeth are so sharp that such bites tend to bleed dramatically. However, they generally look much worse than they are.

The night watchman who had first found the snake had been watching all this and was most impressed. He does not truly believe us that the snake is non-venomous, preferring rather to accept that I must have powerful protection to undertake such dangerous work.

Not only did I have a sore finger but I had landed on a bunch of stinging nettles so one leg was prickling uncomfortably. There is more to snake catching than merely grabbing the snake!

We have had to remove so many pythons recently that we must now arrange for a major relocation to an area where they will find food and not come into conflict with humans.

August is always a busy time with lots of children dragging parents to see the farm. Some children are a pleasure to take round, really interested, while others make you wish you were an owl that can swivel its head right round and look behind to see what mischief they are up to!

Baby Boomslang Snake

Photo by Royjan Taylor

We have had a hatching of boomslangs - check out the huge eye and bright head of the baby in the photo. These will be released in a suitable locality fairly quickly as it is a problem getting food for such little fellows.

Our big pythons are getting their cage refurbished. There has been a problem with good circulation of air in their cage so a line of pipes are being inset just above floor level at the front and back of the cage which should improve the atmosphere in there and solve the humidity that was giving them skin trouble.

The free-range Foam nest frogs have enjoyed the prolonged rains. Last week the female moved back to the terrapin pond and laid another batch of eggs with at least two males in attendance. The guppies that keep the water clear of mosquito larvae also eat the tiny tadpoles but a few make it to froghood. I found one floating in the shallow drinking bowl of the next-door Hinged Tortoise pen.

One myth we get from Europeans is that vipers, who bear live babies rather than lay eggs, climb trees to give birth so that the babies drop away and do not have a chance to bite Mummy.

Not true. I was pointing out that many heavy-bodied vipers would have a hard time climbing the easiest tree, when a man in the audience insisted that he had had a baby viper land on his head from a coconut tree! He had captured the unfortunate infant in a waste-paper basket and produced it as proof.

Yes, it really was a baby Puff Adder, one of Africa’s four ‘giant’ vipers. The only possible answer was that a predatory crow had carried it up to eat it, but had dropped or simply abandoned it up there.

It was a lesson to me never to say “You will never find a Puff Adder up a tree.” In nature almost anything is possible!

There is a belief in many countries that some snakes squeak, or sing. In fact what happens is that many creatures, when caught by a snake, give a very distinctive call. Hear that call, you’ll find a snake but it may have eaten the caller before you get to it so you believe the snake itself made the noise.

We have singing pythons around Watamu in Kenya - always a female, I am told, and only when it is raining.

I went with a small group of naturalists one rainy night to the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest edge where we could hear three separate singing pythons. We could also hear local farmers banging trees and shouting to scare off raiding elephants so it was all quite exciting.

The ’song’ was an eerie single note, held in increasing volume for a few seconds, like someone blowing across the top of an empty bottle. The calls went on and on but we could not find a way through a thorny tangle to the source.

An expert ornithologist, Colin Jackson (Director of A Rocha, a Christian nature conservation organisation, and a Research Associate of the National Museums of Kenya) with us recorded the sound and verified that it was the call of the Streaky-Breasted Fluff Tail, one of the local bird species. One of our best local snake collectors insisted that he had once captured a female python at the spot where this same sound was heard. That snake never called in captivity.

My theory is that the bird roosts near a female python who will be staying for about three months, brooding her eggs. The python will be good protection for the bird from other predators.

This theory needs verification; we will get it one day. On the other hand, perhaps we should continue to believe that some snakes sing.

My mother never wanted to know for sure that the moon is NOT made of green cheese!