Whipper snapper

There are advantages to being height-challenged. Your nose is closer to the ground and thus more likely to sniff out interesting tails and tell apart toothy grins from green tendrils. Squatting and searching for small squirming things that lurk under leaves and hide behind branches is also far easier on the back and bum. Tall, strapping ducks suffer not from such benefits so the next best thing is to head out with appropriately-dimensioned animals with an instinct for images, even if they growl softly at random moments.

Not too far from the bridge, this juvenile Oriental whip snake (one of two encountered that afternoon) was lurching about at knee level amongst the trailside reeds. It took shelter beneath a leaf while we pondered our line of assault. Not willing to let it wander off into the mangroves below, we wanted to position it for a few minutes of posterity. The snake was about a foot and a half in length and so slender that the neck region was barely half a centimetre in diameter. So fearing that direct contact might damage my duck the creature, a suitable stick was procured and the serpent coaxed with sweet words and empty promises of love and affection to clamber onto the far end of the twig, which was then secured to a tripod. Unlike its older kin, the young snake tolerates poorly intrusions into its personal space, coiling its body and launching its jaws quite a few times at protruding body parts and lens. For all its youth, the reptile was quite bruised and battered, with nicks and kinks along its flank and the half-torso of a biting weaver ant on its back. With luck, it will survive till its next moult and emerge with a new and shiny skin to seduce the willing and scare the shit out of kids who wail as if the world were at its end when they stumble and fall.

Comments

[Evie]

why did you warn me about your blog as well.. now feel faint ick.