Big hungry smelly snakes

Slithery, slippery and stinky was the theme of the last two evenings. I was out with Sijie and his fearless Snakehunting team at Pasir Ris. And WOW, did they find some really humungous snakes! And they were smelly too! I mean the snakes (which also made the some of the snakecatchers very stinky too, more on that later)


Here's the team from Tuesday (sorry, tall people got cropped out as it's hard to frame photos in the dark). They were in the midst of groping the big snake to see if it had eaten.


Shoop tries her hand at doing the 'snake massage' to check for dinner in the snake. Sijie's study requires only snakes that have been eaten. Sijie also shows team members how to tell the gender of the snake and other anatomical details. Of course I know snakes have things like a heart, lungs and stomach, but it's hard to imagine all that packed into the long, skinny, squirmy body.


And the team from Wednesday evening also caught a few BIG fat snakes! And Nor Aishah was back out in the field, fully recovered from the stingray incident with TeamSeagrass.


Some unusual behaviour observed include this snake attempting to eat an obviously dead and rotting fish head. Apparently, these snakes are not known to scavange.


More low-class behaviour was also observed. As one particular snake patiently went about trying to deal with its catch, another snake snuck up and tried to swallow the same fish from the other end!!


And here's one contented snake as it went about the serious business of swallowing its dinner. Although the fish looks too large for it, the snake managed to swallow the entire thing!! Whereupon, Sijie swooped down and promptly added the diner and dinner into his collection for study.


Snakehunters obviously don't read signs very well. But since we were out there at low tide, the warning doesn't quite apply. The rocks, however, were very slippery, and there were MANY rocks.


Shoop gently caught this really Big Mama who was calm and docile.

Later on, Shoop caught another Large Snake that did the propeller job and smeared Shoop thoroughly with stinky goo. Fortunately none of us were near her at the time of the incident. Shoop really smelt bad after that!

At the end of the trip, Shoop got cleaned up. Nevertheless, I sniffed Shoop very hard before I let her into the car. And still made Shoop sit on a poncho just in case. The stink of snake goop stays on forever if it gets onto upholstery. Alvin sat in the car in the next day and when asked, proclaimed that the car didn't smell any worse than it usually did. Hmmm...

Dickson also shared his adventures that night on his blue heaven blog.

The Snake team is out again this evening. But I've chickened out. But Dickson has again shared more about those doggies on his blue heaven blog