In its standard color variety (baby-poo brown & dusty ocher), the arboreal colubrid
Boiga kraepelini is what the 'Murkins would call a "trash snake": kinda omnipresent, kinda non-interesting, kinda ugly, and not even fun to handle, as it's rear-fanged and always in a pissy mood. Calling it the red-headed stepchild of Taiwanese herping wouldn't be too far from the truth.
All this changes radically with the black & grey variation that turns the ugly hatchling into a magnificent animal. Sadly, it's quite rare, and until one day in late August I had only seen two DORs in my whole (short) herping career.
That day, we were coming back from our favorite chili-garlic beef noodle shop, happily emitting noxious gases from various orifices, when suddenly this very weird snake crossed the road. The headlights didn't display the colors correctly, so we only realized what we'd found after closer inspection. We had an extended photo session in the parking lot of a local Buddhist temple (with the temple folks trying to inconspicuously gawk at our flashdance), and then headed home, full of that wonderful, lightheaded feeling only a rare find can bring about.
Little did I know that only two days later I'd find
another black & grey
B. kraepelini, this one much bigger and even prettier than the first one, as it also sported yellow spinal highlights, something I'd never heard of before! It was Sunday evening, the sun had just set, and I was driving along a four-lane road in a suburban area. A little ahead of me in my lane were two mountain bikers, a guy and a girl. Suddenly the guy, who had been riding point, hit the brakes, stood on the street without getting off the bike, and stared at something about ten feet ahead of him. His female companion, riding behind him, also stopped and stood, but didn't get any closer to him, staring instead at the same spot he was looking at. The entire situation, plus their stiff body language and puzzled expressions, just screamed
"SNAKE!". I pulled up, spotted the above-mentioned snake on the tarmac, got out, and took over
. I hooked the animal (very easy with arboreal snakes, they always curl around the hook and then just sit there), explained to the two nonplussed bikers what they were looking at, and in the end they relaxed so much that the lady even held my snake bag open for me, although I'd told them about the
Boiga's light venom ....
The only fly in the ointment was that this snake had a bum eye - maybe hacked at by an enraged bird whose chicks or eggs the snake was trying to steal?
Snake #1
Snake #2
Normal coloration for comparison
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