Black Mamba in a Westville home's roof
On this Snake Rescue call, Nick Evans went to remove a Black Mamba from a perfect mamba hotel. It was securely tucked away in a garage roof on a Westville property!
The garage roof provided warmth and shelter, and probably the odd rat for the snake. And in the water drains below, along the roadside, were an abundance of Dassies, whose young are a favorite meal for Black Mambas.
The property also had a nature reserve in the back yard.
All in all, prime mamba habitat.
However, not everyone wants a Black Mamba in the garage roof, and so it had to go. But it wasn't going to go easy, as Nick was to discover!
Listen to the details in the podcast below.
Meanwhile, in a previous podcast, Snake Rescue's Nick Evans went in search of a snake he hadn't caught in years - a Forest Cobra - on KZN's north coast.
"This snake really played hard to get, and it took a few trips to actually catch it. On one of those trips, we worked for ages, doing proper manual labour. It all paid off in the end!" recalls Nick.
Listen to the details in Nick's latest podcast episode below.
Forest Cobras are a beautiful snake species found on the KZN North
Coast, and become more and more common further north. So not a snake we
see around Durban. And unlike our Durban cobra (the Mozambique Spitting
Cobra), Forest Cobras do not spit.
"Nice for the likes of me!" says Nick.
"They have an interesting, two-toned color appearance. The front half is a yellowish-brown color, and it darkens towards the tail end. The tail end is pitch black. They have a shiny appearance. Like all of our cobras, they are highly venomous. They can also hood up, impressively, too. But if given half a chance, they'll flee, not wanting confrontation."
LISTEN | READ: Green mamba at Sibaya construction site
Catch Nick in his TV series, Snake Season on the People's Weather Channel on DSTV (180 and 115 on Open View) on Mondays at 6pm with a repeat at 9pm.
Listen to past Snake Rescue episodes via our channel below:
Nick's organisation, KwaZulu-Natal Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, is a chapter of The Lawrence Anthony Earth Organisation.
Contact Nick on 072 809 5806 for information about snake removals in the Greater Durban area. Email him if you'd like to find out about his educational talks.
Main image courtesy of Nick Evans