Saving Snakes

Category: 6. Elapidae - COBRAS and MAMBAS | Date: Dec 10 2007 | By: admin

Yes! The world has decided to take notice about saving snakes with the discovery of the Large Brown Spitting Cobra Naja ashei at Bio-Ken Snake Farm in Watamu, Kenya. With the help of a press release that went out on Friday 7th November 2007, in the afternoon through Wildlife direct as a platform, the whole world has been in contact with us about the new Largest Spitting Cobra in the World. This is great news for our conservation work on this species and snakes in general for that matter.

National Geographic have covered the story in great detail on their web site and are sending a team here tomorrow, Tuesday, to take some film footage of this giant snake species. Yahoo carried the story and by Saturday morning I had friends living in as far away places USA, Australia, South Africa and England calling to say that they had just read the news. Last week if you typed Naja ashei in a google search engine you would have got 1-10 of 16 sites covering the species, by Friday night when I went to bed it was 1-10 of 183 by this morning it is a whopping 1-10 of 6,490. This is mind blowing.

I think in all the madness that ensued the best and most appropriate phone call was from an Italian lady that lives in Watamu itself. Tiziana Colis called at about 9:00pm and said I have a big snake in the chicken house eating one of my chickens, please come and save it as the cook wants to kill it and I think it may be one of your new cobras. I got Joseph out of bed and we raced down there to get it in time. Sure enough it was medium sized Large Brown Spitting Cobra Naja ashei. It had killed and started swallowing a half grown chicken. I caught it and Joseph took some pictures with the house owner Ms. Colis. I thanked here for calling us and took the snake to the snake farm. This is an excellent example of conservation working in our area! Pictures below.

I have decided to keep the snake for a few days to get some better pictures before we release it. I will be off to the bush this weekend again so will probably take it there for release.

As you can imagine doing all this takes up an enormous amount of time. I take on work as a building contractor as well as safari guiding as a living to support my family but also to subsidise the snake farm. An ideal scenario would be if, somehow, I could make the work I do with snakes my number one priority and dedicate all my time to that alone. If I was able to get funding to make this possible I feel that I could work wonders in conservation, research, lifesaving teachings and education in this field. We charge a small entrance fee to the farm for tourists, provide snakes and handlers for films and documentaries and do snake shows in the local hotels and this brings us in an income which just about covers the basic costs. Most of the extra structural work done at the farm I have paid for personally or was done by small donations. We need funding to be able to really improve all aspects of our modest establishment and I could dedicate myself wholly to the cause.

Bio-Ken Snake Farm has been running for 27 years so we have the know how, experience and status to warrant this. We have an incredibly dedicated, professional and passionate group of employees at Bio-Ken and I would like to tell them that their loyalty and patience through sometimes very hard times can now finally be rewarded. They are very excited by all this publicity and very proud of what they do.

So here is to Spitting Cobra Day. We have all put the 7th of November 2007 down on our calender as such, I do hope you will do the same!

Come on World……. help me and my team save the snakes.

Photos by Joseph Ojuja

Technorati : Ashe’s Spitting Cobra, Large Brown Spitting Cobra, Naja ashei

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