FieldHerpForum

This Taiwan Habu (Protobothrops mucrosquamatus) was resting on top of the rusty iron door to an old air raid shelter hand-hewn into the hillside along a forest trail in our neighborhood. The trail runs along a foot-wide canal full of fish, shrimp and frogs, and last night we had the pleasure to find six (6) habus along a 200-yard stretch of said trail, all of them but the bunker sentinel on the prowl. While habus are very common in Taiwan, this was definitely a fluke. I didn't take any pix of the others, but we did have the privilege of seeing one of them dive into the drink and swim away with the flow, head aloft. What a spectacle. I'll gladly trade you any morpho butterfly or bird of paradise for the sight of one decent-sized snake undulating away in a body of water. Two of the other habus also treated us to valuable infotainment: rare glimpses of their gaping maws and glistening fangs when they objected to being tonged and heartily attacked the tool with repeated strikes.

Topping off this stroke of herp luck was a very large Dinodon rufozonatum, also by the canalside, but after that our luck ran out for good: a three-hour roadcruise yielded exactly zilch, nada, absolutely nothing. I presume that was God's way of telling me to exercise my fat ass in the woods more often instead of wasting precious fossil fuel, contributing to global warming, and drinking too much supercharged coffee to stay awake at the wheel....

PS: Check out the two bats in the first pic. They were just circling around the snake like crazy, swerving out of the bunker and back inside in mad aerobatics (I think I even saw one do an Immelmann! ). Can't say if they were feeding or just pissed at the flashlights. I don't assume they were hazing the snake, as birds often do with raptors...

That first pic is AWESOME!! (all the shots are great) Thanks

Now that's a quality snake. Any chance the bats were catching the insects that were in turn attracted to the light from your flashlights?

Very neat animal. Another quality post by Twoton.

I always enjoy your posts.

T

Thank y'all kindly for the nice comments! Could be that the bats were hunting for insects attracted by the flashlights. I often roadcruise by scooter, wearing a headlamp, and sometimes bats follow me for miles, circling my head and dive-bombing right into my face. Took some getting used to in the beginning....

Great stuff, Hans. It is amazing to see the Habu up on the rail like that.



I love to see herps, but the glistening turquoise of a morpho or the spectacular plumage of a BOP ... well, they are such great eye-candy! I know, I am a shallow person ...


Regards,
David

David, I guess you're one of the few folks here who have actually SEEN a BOP in the wild. If I had, I might have phrased it differently. No retreat on the morphos, though, we have similar ones in Taiwan, and while they're beautiful creatures, they're just too....too....ephemeral for my tastes

ADDENDUM: My herp guru (Taiwan's foremost serpentologist) just told me that the habu wasn't sitting there for the lovely, cool draft, or even the pretty view - it was most probably hunting those very bats that were circling it. Infrared-equipped snakes have a high success rate hunting bats, see also the Planet Earth segment on caves where they show a python sitting at the mouth of a cave, snatching bats as they fly out to feed.