House snakes: nature’s eco-friendly pest controllers
|Published
WARNING: IMAGE OF A SNAKE’S POST-MORTEM BELOW
Durban snake rescuer Nick Evans has given a brief lesson on how house snakes are good for pest control.
Evans encountered these non-venomous snakes during recent rescues. These snakes constrict their prey and are excellent to have in gardens, storerooms or garages as eco-friendly rodent exterminators.
The first snake, Evans said, was no longer classified as a house snake, which he found annoying. The snake was now part of the water snake genus.
“To me, they’ll always be olive house snakes, but their proper name now is olive snake. Technicalities,” Evans said.
“Anyway, I caught my first one in about 5 years this week!”
Evans said he was called to find a snake in a massive wood pile in Pinetown.
“I moved a few pieces of wood, and to my joy, there was this beautiful olive snake!” Evans exclaimed.
Evans said he also collected the biggest brown house snake he had ever seen. It was at a construction site.
The snake had been unearthed during excavations. The environmentally friendly staff managed to get it into a bag and waited for them.
“I could not believe the size of it when I opened the bag! It was like a smallish mamba,” Evans described.
“Tragically, it died from the accidental wounds it sustained. Our excitement turned into deep disappointment. A punch in the gut type of feeling.”
Evans and veterinarian Dr Carla Goede measured the female snake which was over 1.1m in length.
He said the snake had a piece of her tail missing, from an old injury.
“She weighed over 600g, huge! Does include a half-digested rat,” Evans said.
“The girth of her was insane, but in the middle, we could see a meal.”
Evans said Goede put her veterinary skills to use and carefully did a quick, unofficial post-mortem, to see what was inside.
“To add salt in our wounds of disappointment, not only had she shown how useful she was as a controller of the invasive house rat (one was being digested), but you can also see she was a mother-to-be,” Evans said.
“She was still probably a one and a half months away months away from laying or so. Still. Carla pulled out over 20 eggs! They were nowhere near developed, or even near the right size.”
On Friday morning, he picked up a brown house snake in Westville. It was terrifying a gardener with its presence.
“An adult, but with growing to do. It too had a chunk of tail missing,” Evans described.
He added: “House snakes, particularly adults, are such awesome snakes to encounter.”
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