Just before 6 p.m. one Sunday, my friend Mariette was drinking tea with us on the patio. Suddenly the birds in the nearby tree started giving their alarm calls. Siegie and I looked at each other and both spoke at the same time: “Snake!”
All three of us jumped up and dashed over to gaze up at the branches. A number of white eyes were hopping from perch to perch, flicking their wings and chirping in agitation. Somewhere in the background a batis joined in.
Clearly a major threat was nearby, but the foliage was too thick for us to see what it was. Then I stepped back from under the tree and looked up at it from further away. “There it is,” I cried excitedly. Gliding along a branch was the unmistakable underbelly of a boomslang.
Siegie and I left Mariette to keep an eye on the snake while we dashed inside to grab binoculars. Then all three of us went back under the tree and had a good close-up look. With a thick yellow belly and strong black markings, he was clearly a mature male in all his glory.
“He’s as long as my height,” said Siegie, but Mariette and I reckoned this was male posturing. We all agreed he was a big boy, though – certainly over a metre.
Binoculars glued to her eyes, Mariette edged around trying to get a good look. She was so enraptured that I feared she might fall into the goldfish pond.
After a few minutes, the snake slithered back into the foliage, the birds quietened down and we went back to our tea.
This isn’t the first time a boomslang has come to visit us. A couple of years ago, another large male hung around for three weeks or so, popping up in different trees every weekend. Always, the birds alerted us to his presence.
One day, while Siegie was away, I stepped out onto the patio to check on my feathered friends’ alarm calls and almost bumped into the boomslang entwined in a branch just above eye level. I’m not sure who got the bigger fright – we both beat a hasty retreat.
But the snake reappeared on the ground a while later, skirting around the pond. Then it suddenly lunged towards the pond, sending a frog leaping into the water. I watched, fascinated, as it stretched the front part of its body out over the water, its tongue flicking in and out as it swayed back and forth. But the frog was deeply submerged and wasn’t set to be a snake snack that day.
When I’d told Mariette about the experience she was sorry to have missed it, so I’m glad she was with us to share our latest “snack attack”. Who knows, maybe it’s the same big male that has claimed our garden as part of his private hunting preserve.
