The Puff Adder (Bitis arietans) is
On Tuesday I was called to the house when I was out running some errands. I returned as quickly as possible having understood that there was a big snake in the house. Thankfully, as I got out of the vehicle I found the gardener, the guard and the maid near the fire place in the back yard. Babu, our gardener was standing over a large specimen of the above mentioned puff adder, see picture also above. I recognized it instantly. She was curled up on herself and not in an aggressive posture. Babu was patting her gently with the stiff broom he uses as a rake. The guard and the maid were not nearly as calm as the old gardener but that is to be expected. Babu was in no rush. He asked me to go and get my camera. Below is a picture of him with the enormous puff adder he caught in our garden last year.
Babu is the KiSwahili word for Grandfather. We call him that because he is an old man which is unusual in this area and deserves respect anywhere. We employ Babu full time as a gardener although due to his advanced age, we don’t expect much in the way of labour from him. Babu has a skill set that is much more valuable to us than his experience in lawn and garden care for muzungu types. He is an expert in handling snakes. Apparently he comes from the local clan that is famous as traditional snake dancers and handlers. His services are sought by all on the mine when a snake moves too close for comfort. He captures them and is rewarded for his efforts in the form of a set fee per snake. He then releases each animal safely into the deeper bush surrounding the mine. Babu also is called upon when people suffer snake bite. He uses traditional medicine techniques to treat and apparently heal victims[1].
[1] Babu has spoken to me at length on the preparation and use of this traditional medicine. I have written a paper on this with some anecdotal evidence of his medicines at work which can be made available to interested readers.
So, I ran into the house, collected my camera and returned to the garden to get some pictures of the most recent specimen. Puff adders are terribly beautiful. They have a very distinctive and odd shape, as the picture above demonstrates. This shape makes them move in a deceptively sluggish looking manner. The snake escaped Babu briefly during our photo session and tried to hide herself in some ground cover in a flower bed. She was brought under control more quickly than I could swallow my heart again. Once Babu had the snake’s head safely clamped in one of his confident hands (see picture left), he encouraged me to touch the snake. Their scales are described scientifically as small, overlapping and strongly keeled[1]. Her pale, wide belly scales were surprisingly leathery and tough yet extremely smooth. Those keeled scales on her back felt like organic armour. Truly an amazing thing.
[1] Paraphrased from Spawls et al. “A Field Guide t the Reptiles of East Africa” A & C Black, London 2004 edition
Babu put the snake in a cardboard box and tied it with a length of bicycle tyre bungee. We then placed the snake on the back seat of the car and drove away to find the mine’s safety and health officer in charge of relocation of dangerous snakes. Mr.Kapemba accompanies Babu into the deep bush that covers the mine lease area and they release the snakes together. I can not find the words to adequately describe my feelings as I drove around the town with such a dangerous snake in a box on the backseat. Both Babu and I frequently looked over our shoulders to assure ourselves of the closed box flaps. We didn’t find Mr.Kapemba at his office but thankfully his truck was parked outside the town’s tree nursery and we did find him there. The snake was dumped out of the box onto the warm concrete road for the nursery workers to have a good look and for a final photo session. Then Babu put her back in the box for her trip into the bush with Mr.Kapemba.
Unfortunately, Babu has not always been present when dangerous snakes have appeared in our garden. Thankfully, Kobus is capable of taking matters into his own hands. Simon, Kobus and I were playing outside one weekend afternoon when the guard came running. Thinking it was another relatively slow moving puff adder we all approached the spot he indicated to have a look. I didn’t see it at that point but Kobus spotted it and quickly ordered me to take Simon and the dog inside. We had a large cobra resident. It was startled into retreating into the drainage culvert that runs underneath the end of our driveway. We have no idea how long it may have been living there and preying on the abundant bird species in our yard before it was spotted. The guard explained that when he saw it, it was stalking birds.
Kobus and the guard struggled with that snake for about an hour. They built a toxic fire at one end of the culvert to force it out. The snake wasn’t having anything to do with that. It hunkered down until the fire and its suffocating smoke was just too much. Finally it started approaching the other end of the culvert. 
The snake would stick its head out of the culvert and, correctly assessing the danger of exiting, would retreat. Eventually, knowing that the snake was close to the end of the culvert, Kobus stuck the guard’s shotgun into the culvert and fired. The wounded snake finally left the culvert at which point Kobus decided that it was mortally wounded and safe enough for me to come out of the house and take some pictures from a distance. In the picture on the left Kobus holds the then headless carcass up against himself to measure the considerable length of the animal. Kobus is over six feet tall. While it is unfortunate that this mature snake lost its life, we can’t let such a dangerous snake live in our garden. Mwadui is notorious for its large healthy populations of puff adders and cobras.
We are living with a family of non-venomous snakes that we started to discover a couple weeks ago. We have a lovely screened in porch on the back of our house that serves as our living and dining room. It has double doors that open on the garden. Upon opening one of these doors early one morning, Kobus had a small snake fall on him and slither into a crack between the concrete slab of the house and the step into the garden. A few days later, he caught an identical little snake in the same place and released it into the bush at the back of our garden. On Monday of this week, another little snake appeared in the same place and he caught it and put it in a jar. We kept it in the jar for a day which allowed me to take some pictures and identify it as a White-lipped snake (Crotaphopeltis hotamboeia). The presence of the little snakes in our doorway made good sense as they eat frogs. We’ve had as many as 20 frogs, no bigger than 2.5cm long lining the doorframe on any given morning for the last couple months. However, there had been a sharp decline in their population for a few weeks and now we knew why.
I showed Babu the little snake in the jar when he arrived to work that day. He was very impressed at Kobus’ snake wrangling skills but was a little skeptical of my identification of our specimen as non-venomous. That is also understandable because our experience is that this snake acts very much like a venomous snake. Our book informs us that it is indeed aggressive and will inflict a nasty bite. However, the danger from such a bite is infection and not venom. Later that same day, Babu found a larger version of the same snake. We agreed that it was probably the mother of the little ones that live in the doorway of our porch. She was seriously wounded. Part of her tail was missing and we suspect that our dog was the culprit. We’ve known our little Jack Russell to kill at least one other snake. Babu put the injured snake in a box and cycled her out to a safer place in the bush. We have no idea if she will survive. It seems that this time of year is when the snakes that share our environment make themselves seen. Most of our snake sightings have been between June and August in the little more than a year that we have lived in this location. They are probably on the move looking for water and warm places to sun themselves. I am very grateful to Babu for his ongoing vigilance in safeguarding our family against dangerous snakes and I am also pleased that he has been able to remove them to places where they can carry on with their existence. I think it is best when we can all go about our business out of each others’ way.
