As much as I love my adopted home Taiwan, sometimes I still find the locals a bit odd. Take their attitude towards the weather: this is one of the rainiest countries on Earth, so you'd think people would have gotten used to the odd shower by now. But no! - as soon as there's the slightest drizzle, they start moaning about the "rain". Same with the climate: pampered by tropical temperatures from April to September, they promptly howl "winter!!" as soon as the thermometer drops below 23°C. Starting in mid-September, many of my herper friends bid goodbye to me with the words "Gonna be winter soon. No more snakes. See you next year then!" Of course, my addiction to field herping refuses to subscribe to such a defeatist notion, so I still head out in any weather short of full tropical downpours.
And the madness pays off: unlike the above-mentioned Sunday, er, summer herpers, I still find stuff galore out there. Why, just last night we had the biggest haul of the entire year - sixteen (16) snakes were found cruising back and forth along just one medium-altitude road in our county: nine Bamboo vipers (
Viridovipera stejnegeri), one of which was maneuvering a frog down its gullet; three Taiwan slug snakes (
Pareas formosensis); a big Taiwan habu (
Protobothrops mucrosquamatus); a Greater Green hatchling (
Cycliophis major); a nice Many-banded krait (
Bungarus multicinctus) stalking a big skink in the middle of the road (in the end both got fed up with our voyeurism - the snake high-tailed it into the ditch, the skink ditched his tail, and then went off the other side of the road, leaving the twitching appendage for us to admire), a very rare
Formosan Masked Civet - and the biggest White Plum Blossom (Formosa Wolf) Snake I've ever seen, see below.
So, if this is winter, I'm all for it to stay
The Plum Blossom (
Lycodon ruhstrati ruhstrati) was ambling across the road, and I first mistook it for one of the above-mentioned kraits, not only because I'd never seen such a big one, but also because of their similarity under bad lighting. To quote myself from
another post: "
...the harmless Formosa Wolf Snake (aka Plum Blossom Snake....)[appears]
under poorly lit conditions very similar to B. m. multicinctus. ...[W]
ith the help of a good headlamp, there is NO mistaking the dangerous one. The krait has very sharply separated black and white bands and a triangular body cross-section (hence the name "Umbrella Snake"), while Lycodon has additional grey bands, and the borders between the rings are somewhat more muddled." However, the first two or three inches behind the head do not show these grey bands, and the head is not very distinct from the neck, similar to the Krait. But closer inspection cleared this snake as the harmless cousin.
The genus name
Lycodon - Wolf Tooth - hints at their front teeth, which are much larger than the ones in the rear, and which they use to catch agile lizards. They're fast, twitchy hunters with quite a nervous disposition and a penchant for random biting, but in the end we managed to tire this individual sufficiently to handle it safely and even take a few macro pix by putting it on the windshield. Not only seemed the snake fond of the warm air around the engine hood, but it also couldn't march off in any direction but up (which we prevented), so it fairly quickly gave up and calmed down.....a condition that disappeared as soon as we'd put the beast back on the ground, where it immediately hauled ass at maximum speed.
That snoring beast in the background is Hans jr., first casualty of the late hour
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