Serpentarium Tsintsabis

Some of you may not know, but I have a newfound interest in snakes. It started innocently enough with a trip to the Cape Fear Serpentarium in Wilmington with my friends Bill and Kat to watch the snakes be fed. The serpentarium houses a world-famous collection of snakes from all over the world, which includes king cobras, bushmasters, Gabon vipers, and fer-de-lances, among others. It is also home to some non-serpents: water monitors, crocs, beaded lizards. The reptiles are housed in enclosures designed and built by set designers from Wilmington’s film industry. Each display is accompanied by a detailed description of the snake’s habitat, by interesting facts about the snake, and sometimes by gruesome anectodes, including first-hand accounts of what it is like to be bitten by the snake on display. Interestingly enough, “Southwest Africa” (read “Namibia”) appears in the “habitat” descriptions for many of the snakes.

 

Windhoek in the dry season (the conditions when I was there in 2004) was a snake-free zone. But this year a little rain has turned Windhoek and the bush into a snake paradise of sorts. During my first weekend in Windhoek Stasja and I visited a women’s empowerment project, Penduka, located near a dam and some wetlands in Katatura, the township outside Windhoek. We arrived to find a group of women throwing stones at a smallish snake that turned out to be a spitting cobra. Fortunately for the women (and for me) it was small and had been incapacitated by a big rock to the head. It was not the only cobra the women had seen; earlier in the week the cook had come face to face with a much larger one in the kitchen. When she saw it, she fainted immediately and had to be taken to the hospital and treated for shock. Imagine seeing a giant cobra slithering behind your sink as you wash dishes. I think I’d faint too.

 

On the drive north from Windhoek to Tsintsabis, Stasja told me more stories about snakes – mainly about black mambas that live in the village and puff adders that lie in the middle of his running route. The first evidence I saw of snakes in Tsintsabis was a python track across the sandy main road in the village. It looked like a huge ball had been rolled from one side of the road to the other. Moses examined the track and explained that, the snake had just eaten, probably a mongoose, and had crossed the road in the middle of the night. Judging by the track, the snake was probably about 8 feet long. I haven’t seen the python, but I did see its tracks again recently, this time on the entrance road to Treesleeper. Every once in a while, I hear the birds on the camp go wild, probably because of tree pythons. Maybe its our python is looking for its next meal.

 

The next snake signs I learned to read were black mamba tracks, which Moses and Paul showed me one day when we were doing some roadwork on the camp. They taught me to tell how old the tracks are and to tell which way the snake was moving. Since then I’ve seen a few tracks and one dead mamba that was killed by villagers in the road in front of the bottle store. The mambas are out right now because people in the village are burning dry grass around their homes to drive the snakes from their dens and to give their prey less cover. The first live black mamba I saw was on the entrance road to Treesleeper. I just saw its steely gray tail as it disappeared into the grass. I have seen a couple more since then, but never very close. I think a black mamba is living in the tree next to the reception of the camp, so the next sighting could come soon.

 

Since Stasja first told me about puff adders on his running path, he has seen a couple more and actually had to jump over one to avoid stepping on it (they’re incredibly lethargic). I saw another yellow-bellied sand snake last week, but it ended up dead the next day when our neighbor got her hands on it. Besides snakes, I have seen innumerable lizards and skinks as well as a handful of chameleons (“verklermanikie” in Afrikaans), which hold some sort of mystical power over the locals. When I decided to move one from the middle of the road one day, a crowd of people who had gathered around watched in rapt anticipation as if I were playing with a hungry baby cobra. They made sure they didn’t get within 30 feet of the animal as I coaxed it onto a branch and deposited it into a bush. I’ll have to ask Moses why people are so afraid of them.

 

As winter nears and the bush dries up, snakes move around less and spend more time in a state of semi-hibernation. Unfortunately, the changing seasons heralds the closing of the Tsintsabis Serpentarium, which will make life in the village just a bit less exciting.