It's a Snake!

We have a den of squirrels in the attic, and tonight a mouse ran across the living room floor several times, so it shouldn’t surprise us that our rodent zoo would be visited by a slithery friend. Last night, headed down the long hall to our bedroom, what should we see but a small snake moving right along with us.

Beth had passed into the bedroom when from the left of the hall it wiggled onto one of the steep down-hills and half slid down the slope. The brightly enameled smooth concrete floor didn’t offer much traction for crawling as the snake tried to reverse direction, so we had plenty of time for Beth to toss me a shoe (in this circumstance I have more confidence in a loafer in my hand than the identical shoe on my foot) and for me in turn to give it a few licks with the heel which eventually hit strategic places, and it lay still. I thought it was probably not poisonous, but this was our first encounter and I have yet to find a reasonable guide with illustrations of the snakes of Malawi.

We cut off the head for good measure, lest it recover from a traumatic swoon and seek to join us in bed (I’m not too up on vital signs in long, thin reptiles), and left it in the hall for a closer examination in the morning.

When asking locals, there are only two or three kinds of snakes in Africa, the cobras, the mambas, and the puff adders, all highly poisonous, some proving fatal within fifteen minutes. But the book on the flora and fauna of a neighboring section of Malawi that I saw in the bookstore on Saturday mentioned seven or eight classes, only two of which could present a direct health risk for humans, the cobra and the mamba. Alas, there were no pictures!

Everyone on campus who saw the snake said, “It’s a cobra!” In response to my query, “What about this snake leads you to that conclusion?” I was rewarded with, “If this snake bites you on the leg, your leg will swell up very much and you may die.” “Yes, but what do you see about this particular snake, this one right here, when you look at it that tells you it is one of those snakes?” The reply was, “It is black and the tail gets smaller and smaller to the final point.” Now, this may well define the African cobra adequately (I know that it doesn’t have a hood like its Indian cousin), but I’ve seen lots of round, black snakes with smooth, sleek heads back in east Texas, and they weren’t poisonous. But again, that was East Texas and this is Southeast Africa, and I think the diamond head of the pit viper of the southern U.S. is not characteristic of Africa’s potentially dangerous snakes.

Our snake measured about 8.25 inches long. It had a total of 167 body plates from just below the rear portion of the jaw attachment to the anal plate (I read something about number of plates in that book on Saturday) and I found no fangs of any kind while probing its mouth gently with my pocket knife. I must admit never having seen the “rear fangs” of one of Malawi’s poisonous snakes, however, so I may have missed them.

The snake probably entered via a garden door that opens into the hall and will not seal, though it has a double locking system. This week we’re going to the hardware store to buy rat and mouse traps. Somehow I think if we can get the mouse to take the bait, we won’t have him around baiting the snakes. In the meantime if there’s an amateur herpetologist among my readers, tell us what you think, and what I should look for to know if there’s really a threat. And if anyone knows what to do with the squirrels, please pass that along, too.

(A week later on our morning run we came across what looked like a large rattle snake without rattlers who’d lost a fight with something, probably a car. We finished our run and returned in the Mtendere truck. This one had a diamond head and fangs, and is probably a puff adder as it looked like the one my son killed in Mozambique in 2005. And they are colored just like a dried corn field. Add that one to the list and keep watch in the corn.)