Megan Goes Hiking
Snakes in Thailand
I look out for snakes… but then I suppose most people do except the British and the Irish, because we don’t have many at home. After all, no-one wants to step on one in the grass or get bitten by one in the woodpile, but I don’t mean it like that, I mean that I like snakes, although that doesn’t mean that I’m not wary of them.
It’s just that they fascinate me. As you might know, I live in northern Thailand and there are about a hundred species of snakes here around thirty percent of which are poisonous (and most of them are deadly), although I don’t know the absolute numbers.
I imagine that the vast majority of snakes here are not poisonous, although those in banana trees often are. Most of the deadly ones seem to be shortish, green pit vipers with a broad head. There are also two huge pythons, six and ten metres, which are best avoided when they get to that size.
People think that there are snakes everywhere in rural Thailand, where I am, and they may be right, but I doubt if I see one a month, and I’ve only seen one cobra in ten years, and it wasn’t a King Cobra either (also about six metres).
Well, I saw two snakes today, which is a personal best. The first one was a 600mm Lion Snake (a Chequered Keelback), which people here say is poisonous, and the book says might be. It was travelling along the top of our wall and then jumped of into our neighbour’s garden and the second was a 1500mm Wall’s Bronzeback.
I became aware of it because our dog was going crazy. The snake was sitting on the patio leisurely eating a frog and when it was finished, it quietly left.
I don’t know why we had two visitors today, but I suspect that they had been disturbed by the roadworks outside our house. The snakes were lucky that my wife was out shopping or she would have had her son kill them.
All the best,
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Podcast: Snakes in Thailand
