吃抓蛇

Skipped guitar practice yesterday. I wasn't "eating snake", but catching them, at Buloh! It's that time of the year again, snake hunting season, long anticipated by me, long-time wannabe snake wrangler a la crazy tv host style. Ok. I'm exaggerating a little, but the lovely creatures have always fascinated me, legless yet fluid and graceful, beautiful scaly skin (you'd expect scaly skin to be quite awful, but it's quite nice to touch actually), pretty patterns, cute beady eyes, and awfully shy and reclusive, by all accounts. The dog-faced water snake, which we were hunting, has such an adorable face to boot.

So anyway, there we were, wandering around the soft mud at the specified study site, looking in all the puddles and streams (with fish that they eat), Chee Kong found the first one in a patch of hideously soft mud, into which I sank up to my groin on the way out thanks to some help from a fellow newbie snake catcher who'd come round to have a look at the snake too...heh. Pity the mosquitoes were not one bit deterred by the resultant layer of mud around my legs. Sigh. Things were pretty quiet until we rounded a turn and got to a pool of water by a sluice gate, in which dozens of fish were leaping. And then there they were, popping out literally all over the place, small skinny baby ones, all the way up to 80cm long pretty much adult sized specimens. Suddenly there were too many snakes to bag and record. Some were swimming, hunting in the streams, or just sitting around in plain sight. A particularly feisty one turned around and managed to bite me on the hand, but well, I would bite too if I suddenly found myself lift up into the air by a giant hand.

We filled out all the (35 was it?) bags CK had brought along in record time, and were on our way out by 9pm. I'm going again tonight, hopefully we'll have another good haul. :)