I
am not one of those brave people who have snakes as pets, but I have
touched them (in the zoo and at somebody's house who kept a huge boa
constrictor as a pet and as a detractor; he had a sign on his gate,
saying: Keep out Attack snake).
I see snakes all the time around
our house and in our house and I am not happy about it, but I don't
kill them either. I let them go or, on occasions I have put them in
a container and taken them to the zoo. They tend to wrap themselves
around a broom stick and then I can stuff them into a garbage bag
or other container, except for the black cribo, it does not do that
and the one I tried to catch like that in my living room one night,
disappeared in the tiniest of cracks where a built in cupboard meets
the floor.
Yesterday
there was a Laura inside my room where I have the computer. It was
wrapped around the wrought iron which is across the outside door,
but he was on the inside. When I got up he became frantic, looking
to escape, found one of the wooden louvres , slid through, then literally
jumped across the space from the door to the chain link fence and
disappeared. I was much more scary to him than he to me. And the Laura
is a pretty snake too. It is also called Parrot Snake, I guess Laura
actually comes from the Spanish Loro = parrot.
I
am adding this section to my homepage because I don't like to see
people kill animals unnecessarily. I kill mosquitoes and roaches (which
I abhor) and some other things, but not snakes, not frogs and lizards
either. I don't go so far as to carry them around, but I don't kill
them. So I would like people to be able to distinguish between poisonous
snakes and non-poisonous snakes, so they wil not panic each time they
see a snake nearby.
A
long time I obtained a booklet from the zoo (maybe 30 years ago) which
was never reprinted. this has helped me a lot in identifying the snakes
in and around my house and to know when I should tackle them myself
or call the zoo keepers to come and fetch them. In the booklet it
says that there are 37 different types of snakes in Trinidad and Tobago,
ranging from the smallest in the world to the largest. Now, isn't
that interesting ?
Let's
start with my friend, the
Laura or Parrot snake, also called Green Horsewhip
Leptophis
ahaetulla 
The
top of the head and entire length of body is bright emerald or leaf green. The underside is a muddy brown, just
like its "cousin", the horsewhip snake, which is entirely
brown.
