Durban — Just as snake catcher Nick Evans was leaving a call-out after the black mamba he was there for disappeared in a section of roofing, the snake poked its head out.
This was a call-out on Friday evening after a lady in Glenmore in Durban called him about a black mamba in her house and her son was with her, watching the snake.
“She then sent me a video - it definitely was a black mamba,” Evans said.
He said the dogs had also noticed the snake, but fortunately for all animals there, the mamba was in an elevated position. The caller’s son also, fortunately, acted quickly and locked the dogs away. He kept a close eye on the snake until Evans arrived.
“When I did arrive, the caller’s son had just lost visual of it. It had gone onto a section of roofing and just seemed to have vanished, as snakes often do, even the big ones, like mambas. A frustrating habit, for someone like me!
“I looked around and noticed that, if it moved across the roof sheeting, it would have got access to a ceiling, to which there was no access to. I couldn’t rip the sheeting off either. It seemed odd, though, that the caller's son didn’t see it go there,” Evans explained.
He said that after looking around some more, there did not seem to be much more he could do. He was very concerned about the dogs finding the mamba, for their sake, as well as the mamba’s.
“As I was leaving, the homeowner’s son looked once more where he last saw it and spotted it! The face was poking out, where the body was, I still don’t know,” Evans said.
“Getting it out of wherever it was hiding was tricky. It was an awkward position to access. It didn’t seem to be under a section of sheeting. It wasn’t in the gutter. There was a steel beam, which a snake could hide in, but it wasn’t in there. It must have found a gap in the wall that was plastered over or gone into one of those hollow bricks. As I say, we still don’t know for sure.
“I couldn’t just grab its face with the tongs. I’d hurt it, aggravate it, and I wouldn’t be able to do much from there. I jiggled the tongs a bit, gently coaxing it to stick a few centimetres more of its neck out. Eventually, after a while, that worked, and I grabbed behind the head with the tongs. I pulled the head towards me, as gently as possible, and secured the head in my hands,” Evans explained the removal.
He said that compared to Tuesday’s “monster” black mamba, this one was not big, only around 2.1m.
“Still, an exciting way to end the week!” Evans exclaimed.
He also thanked the homeowner’s son for all his help.
Daily News
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