Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
had was particularly good at eating dead food. It had been injured by laborers cutting cane but
after cleaning, Vaseline and sewing up, it recovered very well. It was sold by a dealer in
Pretoria for R50 and smuggled out later to London in briefcase, talk about a lethal nonmetallic
weapon on a plane. Once, visiting young kids tried to let one of my mambas out of its glass
front box. It of course considered the box its den but later when I came by I found it sunning
itself on top of the wooden box. Not having my homemade tongs around for handling it, I gently
tapped its box and it crawled right back in again. The largest mamba I tried to catch but never
succeeded in was one that lived alongside the Gogwane River in a dense thicket of vines. I did
succeed in getting its shed skin and kept it draped in the corner of my room. It was eleven feet
eight inches long. On one occasion when my brother and I were scouting out its lair and we
approached from downstream on the Gogwane River we then had to climb out of the riverbed.
There was a 20-foot embankment with multiple holes that bee-eaters used for nesting we
needed to climb up with a bush near the top that offered a good handle hold to use to get up the
bank. As we started up, an inner feeling or voice warned me not to climb up to the bush.
Instead we went back downstream and crawled up a more difficult and steeper part. Diana our
terrier needed some help up. We then walked back up stream now above the bush. As we got
alongside it, a smaller mamba about 10 feet long lying sunning itself in the morning sun,
flashed down the embankment we had just planned to climb up. If we had grabbed the bush, the
mamba would have attacked us as it sought refuge into its home in the embankment holes. We
would never have survived being so far from the hospital. I have no explanation for the
warning other than a guardian angel. Twice I saw mambas that were probably in the 14-15 feet
range. Once we were standing on the dirt road watching animals flee a roaring bush fire at
dusk. The noise can be quite overwhelming and the flames spiraled like mini tornados of fire
into the sky. To our right, a mamba stretched across nearly the whole road and slithered across
at tremendous speed, a third of its body off the ground, its head higher than ours. Another time
on the banks of the Hlabanyati River going down to cross the low cement bridge, a mamba
raced across the dirt road in similar fashion, its body stretching across most of the dirt road. Its
forearm size body thrust it at high speed across the road, despite the lack of branches or grass
to propel it even faster. Stevenson-Hamilton tells the story of a mamba chasing Harry Wolhuter
on his horse; a story Wolhuter also recounts in his own topic, although not as dramatically.
Wolhuter describes a mamba killing seven of his dogs. Sadly, there are many reports of a
mamba getting into an African hut and killing all the people entrapped within. Wolhuter also
described shooting a python that had swallowed one of his dogs. He was able to cut the dog
out and it soon recovered. Of separate interest, snakes can increase their metabolism by ten
times when digesting a meal (a human may increase up to 25 % with a meat meal). In the case
of pythons, they also rapidly grow their hearts to accommodate the increased metabolism,
which of interest to cardiovascular physicians trying to save damaged hearts. Wolhuter also
described the trading post near his camp at Pretoriuskop of Joao Albasini, one of the first
European settlers in the area, 1845, who protected the locals from raiding Swazi army impis.
The first known European was F. de Cuiper who travelled the area in 1725 and William
Edward O'Kelly settled in Swaziland in 1820. When faced with an attacking mamba the only
sure protection is a shotgun with bird shot, although Corbett in India relates using a rifle to
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