First of the season Hong Kong 2014

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RonanK
Posts: 21
Joined: March 29th, 2014, 8:45 pm
Location: Singapore

First of the season Hong Kong 2014

Post by RonanK »

WELL. The herping season has finally kicked off here in Hong Kong, so I seized the opportunity of a long Easter weekend to do a little bit of herping.
I started by just taking a quick wander through a conduit close to where I live, to see if stuff was moving. A friend had found a nice chunky Indochinese Ratsnake (Ptyas mucosus) in the same conduit a few days before. However, when I got there, I only found two live snakes and a couple of dead ones.

Apologies for the low quality pics, only had my iPhone
Dead Many-spotted Catsnake (Boiga multomaculata) - one of my targets

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Live Juvenile Greater Green Snake (Cyclophiops major)

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Dead White-spotted Slug Snake (Pareas margaritophorus)

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Live Brahminy Blind Snake (Rhamphotyphlops braminus)

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Not terribly productive, but there was something at least.

The next day I met up with some friends who I regularly herp with and we went to walk a conduit on Lantau Island. This conduit is known for being pretty rich in cool species. Things like cobras, kraits, coral snakes, and pythons can be found here, and a lot more besides. This is the same conduit that Kevin Messenger found his King Cobra in in 2012.

Although there were no Kings on this trip, it was very good by early season standards!
We dropped in just as the sun went down. Since this was pretty early in the herping season here, I actually did not really expect to find much.
After about 15 mins of walking in the conduit, we found the first snake; a sub-adult Red-necked Keelback (Rhabdophis subiminatus helleri)
I don't have shots from in the conduit, as it was quite wet, but we took the snake out and did a little photo shoot before we released it.

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(You can see the Duvernoy's glands quite well on this pic)

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The first of the next two snakes were literally 30 seconds from the keelback; Radiated Ratsnakes/Copperhead Racers (Coelognathus radiata)
And another one was found about 15 mins later.
I wanted to get pics of them in the conduit, but they were too fast. I also wanted to get a pic of their "puffed up" threat display, but they were both just too tame to be bothered with defending themselves, and they just wanted to get away.

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Lars, a non herper, who works at an outdoor adventure company here; with his first wild snake.

After a short while of just walking without seeing much, my herper friend John and I were just crossing a deeper runoff when we heard a call "SNAKE!" from Lars and Smirthi (the two non herpers).
We rushed back to the deep catchment and we saw the brown body of a snake wound around the threaded rod used to lift the sluice. I initially though - ratsnake - but as soon as I touched it with the tongs, it hooded up. The two non-herpers had just spotted a 3-4ft cobra that the two herpers had just blindly walked past. :oops:

This cobra (Naja atra) was brown in colour, unlike the usual dark black with white/cream bands. I have heard from local herp guys here that the brown cobras spit. Now, Chinese Cobras are known to seldom spit (from info from the Hong Kong School of Biological Sciences), and I have never seen a cobra from Hong Kong spit before, until this brown one.
I extracted him from the sluice, washed the machine oil off of him, and started to pose him for some quick snaps in the conduit. Whilst I was getting him to maintain a hood, he struck forward, throwing himself forward with an open mouth. This action reminded me of the spitting action of a Rinkhals (Hemachatus hemachatus) where the whole body is involved in the spitting action, as shown in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2EC7pgskdE

I did not feel venom, or was aware of any venom being released by the snake, until I reviewed some of the pics, and saw this one:

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Here, you can just make out the venom being released from the fangs. I will definitely be carrying eye protection with me next time!

We managed to get some shots of the cobra both in and out of the conduit. He was covered in machine oil, and had an open wound on the dorsal surface of his tail, but was otherwise very fit and healthy. A truly awesome find!

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Posing him
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John and the cobra
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Lars (the non herper who found it) and the cobra
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Parting shots before release
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This brought an end to a great start to the Hong Kong herping season
Hopefully this means that the 2014 season will be a long a fruitful one!

As ever, stay tuned for more posts from Fraggle Rock and wherever else I end up
In the meantime
Cheers and Happy Herping!
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Dr. Dark
Posts: 380
Joined: June 8th, 2010, 4:39 pm
Location: Concord TWP, Ohio

Re: First of the season Hong Kong 2014

Post by Dr. Dark »

WOW...GORGEOUS cobra indeed! Awesome find!
nicklankester
Posts: 1
Joined: September 15th, 2014, 3:18 am

Re: First of the season Hong Kong 2014

Post by nicklankester »

Hey Ronan, would be interested to find out how the rest of your season went?! I have just moved back out to HK this summer, and have been seeing a few snakes around. Got a few pics to put up actually, will do so in due course. As of late (last 2 and a half weeks) have found 2 many spotted cat snakes, one juvenile chinese cobra, a chinese mountain snake and a juvenile many banded krait. All from HK island, most from catchments (Tze Lo Shan and Lady Clementi's) and one of the cat snakes was found on Cecil's Ride path, in the middle of the path, surprised no one had stepped on it and crushed it! Would love to get over to Lantau at some point, as it seems that there is more activity over there. Ciao
RonanK
Posts: 21
Joined: March 29th, 2014, 8:45 pm
Location: Singapore

Re: First of the season Hong Kong 2014

Post by RonanK »

Hey Nick,

I'll actually be back in Hong Kong on the 16th of October for a few days. If the weather is still good, I'll most likely be going herping. If you want, you are more than free to join. I'll probably be doing Lantau or possibly the New Territories.
I'm working on a rest of the season post, but will probably mash it into a massive end of year thing. Hong Kong was very good to me this year ;)
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