Do you know how to tell if a termite hill is occupied? You stick your hand down it and feel the heat rising from the thousands of insects scurrying through the mound. I discovered this during a walk with the resident ornithologist at Lake Baringo in Kenya’s Rift Valley.
I was staying at Lake Baringo Club for a few days as part of a three-week journey around Kenya in the mid 1980s — a brief enough journey, but one that has given me a life-time’s worth of memories. Holiday memories are made up of many things; not just the glorious guide-book images, perhaps more lasting are those arising from occasions when one gets away from the guide-book.
I’d read somewhere that Jonathan Leakey had a snake farm close by Lake Baringo. I’d been told that it was no longer open to the public, but I decided to see if I could find it anyway. I asked for directions from the receptionist at the Club. He did his best to dissuade me, but seeing I was determined, eventually explained that I should follow the track through the local village towards the forested area by the lake-side. It didn’t sound too difficult to find, so I set off, feeling very adventurous.
Approaching the village I was soon joined by a lively group of Njemps children, eager to act as guides. Wanting to maintain the sense of adventure, I turned down their offer. They cheerfully waved goodbye to me as the road became little more than a footpath and I reached the forest. I followed the track for perhaps half a mile until I came to a small jetty bearing a sign announcing itself as the embarkation point for Lake Baringo Island Camp. A boatman there indicated that I’d missed the turning for the snake farm and redirected me back down the path.
Arriving at a group of what looked like overgrown chicken runs, I could see a building a little way off through the trees. There was no sign of a path but I pushed my way through rock strewn undergrowth towards the building. Rounding a bush which looked a little more cultivated than those I’d skirted previously I found myself on the drive of a very British-looking house. A rather surprised man washing a large car asked if he could help me.
I told him I was looking for the snake farm so he led me down a footpath to a small outbuilding. Informing me that he would have to go and find someone to show me the snakes, he disappeared. A quarter of an hour passed and someone else arrived, rattled the door of the outbuilding and peered through the window. Then he too disappeared, after explaining in broken English that he was going to find the man from the village with the key.
A further twenty minutes passed and two more men turned up. This time one of them had a key. I expected him to unlock the building and show me inside. Instead they took me for a short walk through the forest until we arrived at the disused chicken runs I’d passed twice before. One of the men unlocked the padlock on the wood-framed chicken-wire door.
The other man grinned, and picked up a stick. “Now I show you snakes,” he remarked, entering the ‘run’. Looking closer I could see that the wire-netting enclosure was built around a tree in which were draped several large Black Mambas. He hit the tree a resounding blow with his stick and a couple of the Mambas dropped to the ground. He slipped the end of his stick under one and expertly flipped it through the gate out of the enclosure and onto the ground at my feet.
While I knew that travellers’ tales of Black Mambas catching galloping horses in order to bite the rider were somewhat exaggerated, I did feel that a snake rudely awakened from a snooze in a tree and thrown at someone’s feet could be forgiven for feeling a little peeved and maybe venting its irritability on the nearest human being. I took a couple of steps backwards.
“It’s OK,” said the gentleman with the key, “we are watching him.” It didn’t seem worth pointing out that he was ‘watching him’ from behind the open gate of the enclosure, and the Mamba was about four feet away from me and pointing in my direction . (And what was he going to do if the snake struck, grab its tail?) The other man came out of the enclosure and locked the door behind him. He stood by the snake, stick at the ready. Every time the Mamba showed any sign of moving towards me he flipped it back with the stick. Meanwhile the key-man told me something about the snake’s life style — how the poison worked, how long it took to act, and so on.
The snake was about five feet long, slenderly built and grey in colour. After about five minutes the stick-man picked it up, opened its mouth and showed me the curved, hinged fangs and the black interior of its mouth which gives it its name. A drop of venom dripped from one of the erect fangs. To return the Black Mamba to its enclosure he simply threw it over the wire into the tree.
Now we returned to the outbuilding. The key-man unlocked the door and his companion (now without his stick) went inside. He returned holding a slim, attractively marked snake perhaps three-and-a-half feet long which he thrust into my hands. “Striped sand snake,” he announced.
“Isn’t that poisonous?” I asked, dissuading the creature from crawling up my sleeve.
“No, not really,” he replied. “Well, only a little bit.”
I discovered later that the striped sand snake is a mildly-venomous back-fanged snake. In other words, after striking at its victim it needs to chew at the wound in order to introduce venom, instead of injecting it like a mamba and other front-fanged snakes.
He took back the sand snake and returned with a puff adder. Although only a little over four feet in length, the snake was very heavy bodied. It seemed to exude malignancy as it lay on the ground at my feet coiling and re-coiling with its head held off the ground.
I was shown a simple technique for picking up any highly venomous snake. “Watch,” he said, and placed a foot (clad in worn canvas shoes) on the puff adder’s neck then grabbed the snake just behind the head with one hand and halfway along the body with the other. The whole operation was accomplished so swiftly that the snake seemed to have no time to object. I didn’t take him up on his offer to let me try this for myself.
A succession of other snakes followed, including a Gaboon viper (as beautiful as the puff adder was sinister) and a rhinoceros viper (hissing very loudly). After that, what the handler obviously considered to be the highlight seemed a little tame, a ten-foot African Rock Python. It was approaching lunch-time so offering my thanks and paying the ten shilling fee, I set off to find my way back to the Lake Baringo Club.
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