Waterberg trip

[K&S]

Just spent a week in the Waterberg showing some Aussie friends of mine around. What a great place to be for a weekend ... and don't brag Emlyn that you're going back. Lots of game and saw a huge black mamba but as usual didn't have my camera!

I went and either broke a half shaft or stripped the splines on the rear Salisbury axle on a steep stoney incline. This weekend I will pull the shafts out to have a shifty at them. Ah well the joys of owning a land rover.

Also took them to the Apartheid museum in Joburg which I found very impressive.

[El Stiemo]

Hi kevin,

nice pictures, thanks for sharing.

Frank

[bvudzichena]

Mamba? Did someone say mamba?

Should have called me to come and rescue it. My repterarium's empty at the moment...

Your photos are lovely Kevin. Just shout if you need a spanner boy to help with the back axle.

[K&S]

Thanks Eben for the offer. I'm hoping it's just the splines on the wheel hub thingy. I've bought one from Rob Leimer just in case with the proviso to take it back if I'm wrong.

You would have been in your element there. Two days before we were there they removed a puff adder from the verandah (or should I say stoep and confuse our overseas readers?).

A pub meet in overdue.

[bvudzichena]

A pub meet in overdue.


How about mid March?

I have a trip scheduled first to to Dubai and then on to our Serpent Toxins operation in Pune, India and am trying to get onto a flight on 8 March. Should be back around the 16th.

[bvudzichena]

Talking about snakes...

Yesterday evening I settled onto the sofa to watch Arsenal vs Blackburn when the phone rings. The display said "Private Number" so I figured it's either Benz or Land Rover calling to find out what I thought of their last service and I answered the call - mistake.

On an aside: Both companies use a market research firm to get feedback from their clients each time you take your vehicle for a service. The people making the calls are very annoying and have somehow worked out when you are at our busiest or when it's most inconvenient. Anyways, Arsenal wasn't doing too well so I decided to vent my frustrations on the call centre agent.

I answered the phone
Me: Hello
Other Person: Is dit die oom wat slange uit mense se huise haal?

It turns out the constable was calling from Montana, that they'd been calling herps for the past couple of hours, that they are all either drunk (Pret on a Wednesday), away or asleep and I was the first one who was sober and awake.

He said it was a huge python, in the bedroom, gave me the address and asked me to rush over.

My GarMap software on the GPS paid for itself there and then. Highly recommended product.

Not that I needed it, when I came around the corner to their house there were a couple of bakkies and a couple of polos with their blue lights flashing, an ambulance with it's red lights flashing and two tow truck's who'd heard the commotion on the police frequencies and decided to go and see what was doing on.

So the poor people had Christmas lights in front of their house at the end of February.

When I eventually got past the crowd outside I found half the suburb in the bedroom looking at the part of the snake that was sticking out from under the bedside cabinet. I took one look at the colouring and realised it wasn't a python.

After prodding a couple of people with my snake stick I eventually cleared the room. There was one young Black officer who asked if he could stay on as he'd had an egg eater as a kid, knew how to handle snakes and wanted to help.

This was a godsend as my left arm is useless at the moment. I tried to amputate it at the shoulder two days ago and am still in quite a bit of pain.

After moving the bedside cabinet forward slightly I saw the snake's head. It was the size of my hand. When I saw the rostral horns I immediately realised it wasn't a python, but a Gaboon Viper - and a big one at that.

Most people think because Gaboon Vipers are such slow movers, they strike slowly. All I can say about that is that you don't get to be that huge by being slow on the strike. Gaboon Vipers are in fact one of the top three when it comes to strike speed. They are also in the top three when it comes to quantity of venom. A decent sized Gooney would have me dead within 25 minutes. Make that around 10 - 15 minutes for someone Marc's size. Most people who are tagged by Gooneys don't make it to the hospital. As we all know, they hang around the floors of forests. Nyanga, Vumba and Chimanimani are riddled with them. You get them in the Sabie area (rarely) and they are quite common in northern Natal.

Hospitals rarely see Gooney invenomations. Most herps are very careful when handling them so there are very few accidents. I've even heard of people getting the snakes stoned (as is yah maaaan) before working with them. It's different in the bush. I reckon that guy who's out in the forest looking for something to hunt / eat who steps on one and gets tagged will drop to the ground within ten minutes and be dead within half an hour. Nature is very effective and the scavengets such as storks, vultures and hyaenas will clean the corpse up quickly.

Back to this snake. I went back to the car to get my long stick, my strong tongs and my snakeproof boots and we got going.

Once we got it out from under / behind the bedside cabinet I got to have a look at the snake. It's head is the same size as my hand. That means the fangs are over 50mm long. The torso is the size of my biceps and my first guess was that the snake was at least five foot long.

Snakes can raise themselves up 1/3 of their body length. I didn't want to take any chances with this beast so I decided to first pin the head, then go for a tail lift and into the bag that the policeman's holding - who's almost sh**ing himself at this point. I was not far behind him in the fear stakes.

I pinned the head and the snake immediately doubled back onto the snake stick. It's obviously been handled before (probably milked) and wasn't going to put up with my nonesense so that plan went out the window. I droopped the stick, got the tongs around the tail, squeezed, lifted and hoped for the best. So there I am lifting and lifting and lifting and there's no end in sight to the snake.

I eventually had both hands above my head gripping onto the tongs like mad with the snake performing like crazy, hissing and striking out at anything that moved. The poor little policeman eventually got the snake's head in the bag, lifted the bag up as high as he could and I let go. We secured the bag, got the snake into the back of a police bakkie and drove down to the zoo.

They switched their sirens on until a security guard came out and we told him to get one of the people who live in the place. Eventually one of the curators came out, we asked him if he knew about snakes and he disappeared inside. Half an hour later another curator came out and took the snake from me.

I've just got off the phone to him. It's a West African Gaboon Viper. Mature female, weighed in at 23 kg, 1.84m long.

That snake should not have been there. Those snakes don't move fast and rarely move more than 1km from where they were hatched during their entire lives. As I'm sure you know, you need a permit from National Parks to keep snakes (even exotics). According to the guy at the Zoo, there's nobody with a permit in the area so it appears there's an illegal snake breeder / collector within a radius of five to ten houses from where we caught that snake. The guy as the zoo is too energetic for his own good and has already called the cops.

The snake's been put in quarantine while her fate is decided. Let's hope she makes it to the zoo's serpentarium and isn't put to sleep.

[Geobloke]

Bloody hell! :eek: Great story mate, had me glued to it! :)

[Jode]

Eben (I think I got your name right...) -
Joesus, that was a proper snake! Happily we have't got Gabons here, but we have plenty of spitting cobras on our smallholding...

Which brings me to my point: I hate killing anything unnecessarily (honestly - including ants), but Lene says that any poisonous snake dumb enough to move from the veld into our (smallish) garden around the house is dead meat.

Can you give me some tips regarding handling venomous snakes (like where to buy tongs)? Or am I just asking for it?

A neighbour of ours (a doctor - is that significant?) has collected several forked sticks on his plot which he uses, together with goggles, a heavy coat and boots, for "translocating" snakes off his plot.

Cheers.

[bvudzichena]

Jode,

Everyone calls me Bvudzi...

Can I suggest a Mossberg 500 or a Winchester 1300 fully loaded with No 8 shot? It's highly effective. A Beretta 'over under' is nice, but it's only got two shots :eek:

Some people swear by a .410, but if the snake is longer than you are tall, do you want to put your life in the hands of a 10mm shotgun shell?

Seriously now, there are times when a shotgun is called for. There's a time and a place for everything and if you don't feel safe removing a snake (I'm not going to mess with a 16 foot King Cobra or a 12 foot Mamba. They've had a fair innings and my life is more important than that of any snake - they also didn't get to be that size by being stupid) then there may only be one option if it doesn't want to move on by itself.

:bigun2:


Remember the basic rules or cardio resuscitation are S A B C. Safety, Airway, Breathing, Cardio. Of these, Safety is the most important. Back in the day when I did my EMT, I was taught that it's better to let someone die than to kill yourself trying to save him or her. The same applies to trying to rescue or relocate a snake.

I don't want to die from a snakebite. The mere thought of bleeding through my eyes repulses me. There are much more pleasant ways of dieing. I therefore have type specific anti venom for anything that I may have in my house, as well as pictures etc to show the doctor what type of snake it is. We have a fridge full of anti venom at the lab in India.

I also try to find out which hospitals in my area have doctors who know what a snake looks like. All these things help to ensure that you might just make it if you were to get tagged.

Indian hospitals are all up to speed with snake bites. The doctors there listen when you tell them things. Unlike doctors in Southern Africa, they don't think they are gods. I'm sorry to say this, but you have a much better change of surviving a cobra bite in Gujurat than in Gaberone.

I'd like to quickly touch on a venom spray to the eyes. My business partner in Serpent Toxins was sprayed in his eyes when we were boys out on the farm in Zimbabwe. I remember it well. If you get sprayed, close your eyes tightly and get somebody to use a tissue (toilet roll is excellent for this) to wipe away as much of the venom that's on your face as possible. The pain is a mixture of 'arc eyes' and having a red hot poker stuck into your eyes. Once the excess venom is cleaned off, you must irrigate your eyes with milk - lots of it - and call an ambulance. In our case we had a guy running back and forth to the dairy with a bucket of fresh milk while we waited for the air ambulance to arrive. If you do your "first aid" bit, the doctors should be able to restore the victim's eyesight once you make it to hospital.

The next aspect of safety is respect for the animal that you want to translocate. Always remember that you are dealing with a venomous creature that's going to be in a really bad mood. Contrary to what Steve Irwin told people, snakes do not like being handled. "It's all right little fella, I'm not gonna hurt ya" got him where he is today...

For the record, that Namibian clown we see on National Geographic channel almost met his maker when he was bitten by a snouted cobra in the Kalahari. I suspect most of the cobras in your neck of the woods are snouted cobras. While we're talking about wannabe tv heroes, the Aussie who chases snakes on his Harley (I think he's on Animal Planet) also got munched a while ago - by a death adder in the outback. He lived, but only because of excellent first aid on the scene.

If these people who it for a living in front of cameras can get it wrong, then we need to be on our toes at all times.

If you want lessons on how to handle snakes, watch Dr Brady Barr on National Geographic.

Some people use tongs, some people use sticks. My favourite tool is a metal rod that I bent to resemble a golf putter, I silver soldered the rod to the shaft of an old golf club. Unfortunately I'm not at home at the moment, so it's not possible for me to go and take a picture of it. It's almost identical to this (http://www.snakesticks.com/images/whole.jpg) one. They are very handy (but you could also a stick to do the same job) for keeping the business end away from you when you do a tail lift.

I'm a proponent of the traditional tail lift. Pin the snake behind it's head with your stick. Grab the snake by it's tail. Use the stick to keep the head away from you and dump the snake in a bag before it even realises what's going on.

Snakes can strike up to 1/3 of their body length. If the stick is less than 1/3 of the total body length from it's head, it can't double back to tag you. Short and sweet and simple.

Tongs are generally designed for extraction - pulling a snake out from under a cupboard, out of it's hole or off a branch.

The locally manufactured tongs (http://www.africanreptiles-venom.co.za/Pillstrom-Tongs_top60cm_mid.jpg) are dangerous. The springs and cables sit outside the shaft. Imagine if you will; a mamba clamped in the tongs. The snake winds itself around the shaft and gets jammed in the spring or the cable. Are you going to untangle it? I'm not stupid enough to mess with a snake that's in pain from being pinched by a piece of spring steel.

A couple of years ago we relocated our venom production facility from South Africa to India. Having the chance to build something new from the ground up meant that we could make use of the latest and greatest handling and storage equipment that was available. I went and had a look at a couple of snake ranches in the USA to see how they do things there. One thing that was constant on almost every ranch was the use of red Whitney (http://www.whitneysnaketongs.com/) Tongs. I decided there and then that I wanted some. It took me more than a year to eventually get the tongs. Even though I was ordering over $500 worth of tongs, nobody was interested in selling to Africa or India. Eventually I found a guy called Todd Malone who owns BurroBlancoAZ (http://www.burroblancoaz.com/servlet/StoreFront). This man went to a lot of trouble to help me to get my tongs.

The biggest issue one has when using tongs is remembering not to press too hard. You could easily break a snake's back with a pair of tongs. Even though I have the best tongs in the world, I only use them if it's absolutely necessary.

Our Keralas in India who work with the snakes on a daily basis - feeding them, medicating them, cleaning their boxes and extracting venom - only use sticks and rubber mats.

Once you have captured the snake, you need to keep it some place safe Most herpetologists will have a collection of canvas sacks. Remember, snakes can bit through canvas. Get the bag into a plastic dustbin - or some other secure storage system as quickly as possible. Big Tupperware containers are good if you don't have bags. Just be careful when opening the containers as the snake will be scared and will most probably strike when it sees movement.

Goggles are a must when dealing with Cobras. I have some Tasco yellow lens wrap around shooting glases that have always done the trick for me. You can't go wrong with old fashioned goggles though.

I'm sure you've heard that the majority of snake bites are below the knee. It may be wise to invest in a pair of snakeproof boots from Cabelas (http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/templates/index/index-display.jsp?id=cat600749&navAction=jump&navCount=1&parentId=cat20564&parentType=category&cmCat=MainCatcat20564).

Where do you plan on releasing anything you may catch?

In reply to the rest of your email; we don't have Gaboons in Pretoria either. That poor snake unfortunately came to a sticky end. It appears that I ruffled a couple of feathers. The guy :flammer: at the zoo got pi**ed off because she wasn't called to collect the snake, so recommended that it be destroyed.

I'm not sure why your neighbour would wear a think coat - apart from the obvious advantage of keeping warm. In my opinion, a thick coat would hinder your movement. Not good.

Good luck and please feel free to ask me any further questions.

Looks like I need to extend my apologies to Kevin and Shirley for hijacking their thread.

[K&S]

Jode,


Looks like I need to extend my apologies to Kevin and Shirley for hijacking their thread.

That's cool. It's taken an interesting turn. I'm enjoying reading it.

What you said about the shotgun brought back memories. When I was in the police in Rhodesia I was called to kill a cobra in the garden of a house. Took the Browning single shot shotgun and from about 6 feet I missed it! :eek: . But boy oh boy did that snake get a fright :rolleyes: .

[Jode]

Bvudzi -
Thanks very much for the thoughtful response regarding handling snakes. FYI any snake that we caught I would try to let loose in the undeveloped parts of our area (there are about 100 small-holdings where we live, most of which remain undeveloped).

But handling snakes is clearly NOT something you do on a whim - I need to do some serious thinking and planning if I really want to save the 5 or so venomous snakes that we tend to kill each year.

Thanks again for the info (and by the way, was the nutty Namibian you wrote of Austin James Stevens? I understand that he's living in Namibia and researching reptiles there at the moment).

Cheers.

[Jode]

That's cool. It's taken an interesting turn. I'm enjoying reading it.

What you said about the shotgun brought back memories. When I was in the police in Rhodesia I was called to kill a cobra in the garden of a house. Took the Browning single shot shotgun and from about 6 feet I missed it! :eek: . But boy oh boy did that snake get a fright :rolleyes: .
Kevin - more highjacking:

If you have a problem snake in our neck of the woods you call out the Botswana Defence Force. They've got a very good snake unit, well-trained and well informed. So friends of ours who live just north of Gaborone found a cobra (mozambican) in their hen house - it had killed about 5 hens just trying to go for their eggs.

So our friend called the BDF - this was early am. Nobody comes. So just before lunch he calls again - sorry, still no transport. So finally in desperation after lunch, with still no cavalry in sight, he grabs his double-barreled 12 gauge, marches into the hen house, and plasters the snake with one shot. He picked it up for his wife to take a photo and 4 eggs roll out of its mouth!

He called the boys in green and told them not to bother...

Cheers.

[wildchild]

Mamba? Did someone say mamba?

Should have called me to come and rescue it. My repterarium's empty at the moment...

Your photos are lovely Kevin. Just shout if you need a spanner boy to help with the back axle.

hey, that's my job budzichena- spanner boy (girl). :D
and.. didn't anyone ever tell oyu snakes are dangerous??? :eek: