Our kids John Rommel, and Saranya Carr were at their friend Fara's house one night recently when someone outside started screaming "snake!" On rushing out the kids found a group of terrified people including Fara's mom having hysterics over a snake. The discussion was already on as to how they could best set it on fire and who was going to whack it!After calming them down a bit, with the help of a backpack, the offender was coaxed into hiding in the bag by Vasanth, Saran, Rommel, and Manuraj, the bag zipped up, and our friend, as yet unidentified, was brought home.
We took a look under good light and it turned out to be a 2 foot wolf snake.The Indian wolf snake (Lycodon aulicus) is a very pretty and nonvenomous snake that's actually fairly common even in towns and cities. Human towns tend to have high populations of mice and rats, and are therefore attractive to snakes such as the wolf and trinket snake.
We did try to get the forest department to come and pick the wolf up, as that's the proper procedure, but they declined, so Rommel and his friend Dinu took our pretty wolf out to a nearby mountain range where there's a good stretch of reserve forest and one very happy snake was released to the wild.
If you aren't too sure about identifying snakes and deciding whether they might be venomous, check out our earlier post to help you identify India's venomous Big 4 and to give you a few tips on dealing with snake bite - just in case!
2 comments:
We can't save them all! Yesterday we did save one cobra (Naja naja) but failed to save a rat snake (Ptyas mucosa). The poor nonpoisonous rat has been mostly nocturnal and had stayed out of sight till yesterday when she came out a 10 and was spotted and promptly bashed to death. I was just 15 minutes too late getting home from work yesterday...
The 'we' that saved the cobra was actually Saranya, John Rommel and a few of their friends, Manu, Farid, Faruq, Vasanth, Farah... and I was not yet home - so, great going!
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