The Travancore Wolfsnake

Most people are surprised to know that I don’t go looking for snakes. Almost all the snakes I handle and photograph are infact rescued animals. People from in and around my village in Goa call me whenever they have a snake in their house and I go pick it up. After bagging it I bring it back home, photograph it if it looks interesting, and then release it into the wild. Snake calls come at any odd hour (sometimes in the middle of the night!) and include reptiles of all shapes and sizes pulled out from all kinds of places. I’ve once pulled out a wolfsnake from the chain guard of a motorcyle!

Considering each call is quite different I do tend to get a variety of snakes. Even so the places I rescue them from have one thing in common: they are all human habitats. So almost all the snakes I rescue are from a list of about twelve species. The remaining thirty odd species you could also find in Goa I never get. These snakes are either restricted to specific areas, or specific habitats, or may just be so secretive that they never come into conflict with humans.

Recently though I decided to make an excursions into the Ambolim forest in Maharastra. I had heard that it was an excellent place to find reptiles and I was exploring the prospects of taking my regular birding clients ‘snake watching’ for a change!

I’d been recommended a hotel called Whistling Woods and told that the owner Hemant Ogle was quite knowledgeble on the wildlife in Ambolim. Hemant and his wife took me for a walk that night on a road that cut through the forest behind their hotel. We carried torches and umbrellas. The monsoons are the best time to spot snakes there. It was now September and already a little late to be finding snakes there.

But the rains last year were late too so by the time we got back to the hotel ninety minutes later I still had managed to see five snakes. And I was soaking wet!

I liked Ambolim so much I went back soon after with a few clients. On my third trip I was lucky to find this gorgoeous Travancore wolfsnake. In the fifteen years I’ve been rescuing snakes I’ve never found this species. I clicked away as delightedly as my clients! Hemant had shown me how to use my flash for photographing snakes in the dark on one of the previous trips. So I ended up with some pictures that I was quite proud of!

From experience I know the common wolf snake to be a real biter. Handle a freshly caught common wolfsnake and you’ll almost certainly get bitten atleast a couple of times. I imagined it might be the same with the Travancore wolfsnake and therefore decided not to handle it. Later when I got back home and consulted Whitaker and Captain’s book I learnt that  the Travancore wolfsnake rarely bites when handled.

While the common wolf snake is found throughout India (including Lakshadweep but not the Andamn and Nicobar Islands), the Travancore wolfsnake is mostly restricted to the Western Ghats and parts of Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. This little reptile is usually found in the hills and infact was once called the Hill wolf snake for the same reason. It lays 2-6 eggs in April – May.