Snakes

Sunday's adder reminded me of similar encounters in days gone by. Mlalo, our 'garden boy' in Mombasa, used to find snakes not infrequently, which he quietly despatched with his panga, and as small boys we were discouraged from going into the 'bush' that still covered parts of Mombasa island. However, snakes were never a serious problem until I spent two terms at Bernard Mizeki College in Southern Rhodesia in 1963 when we had them coming on to the college campus. If the students found one they tended to get very excited, crowding round and throwing stones at it - which was likely to provoke an attack, particularly from poisonous snakes like the Egyptian cobra, one of the more common species. Both then and when....

....we returned to Rhodesia in 1967 I was asked to look after the school's .22 rifle which, using dumdum bullets, I used to kill any snakes posing a threat. The picture shows a boomslang which, with its brown mate, had taken up residence in the roof of our bungalow.

Snakes didn't feature again in my life until we went to Ardnamurchan. There we encountered adders (thanks to PG for this picture) with the most beautiful markings, and my view of snakes changed from one of necessary destruction to one of total preservation. There are few really dangerous animals in Britain and it seems to me only fair that, if we are to ask Africans to put up with lions, a species which sometimes eats them, in the interests of conservation and tourism, it's the least we can do to love our snakes, particularly when....

....they're as unusual as this black adder, found in an old drystone wall on croft land at the back of our Ardnamurchan home.

So Sunday's adder was like an old friend reminding us that, although humans have decided that the land he inhabits is to change from open moorland to commercial forestry, he represents a memory of the wilderness that this place once was.