If only I’d known about the Wild Dog public holiday today I wouldn’t have bothered to spend all that time at the den. They sure weren’t up to anything. The pups were hardly playing and the adults were all stuck under little bushes in the shade for all the time I was there.
Eventually I gave up on them and went to seek other wildlife entertainment which turned out to be wrestling with a 9-foot Black Mamba, Africa’s most deadly of snakes.
Well……….. actually I didn’t really wrestle it. I was down at Malilangwe dam taking photos of the water birds and hippos and some general scenics when I noticed this snake in a dead tree in the water. But it wasn’t moving. It was folded back on itself with only part of its body sticking out a hole in the tree. On closer investigation I realised the snake was dead. AND it was a huge snake. It stretched all the way from where you see it out the tree to all the way down the crack in the tree.
Firstly to be sure it was dead I poked it several times with a stick and it seemed very stiff. So I climbed the tree and proceeded to pull it from the hole. Well no easy task. It was truly wedged in there and this had probably caused it to die as it couldn’t get any leverage to try and release itself.
But I got a helluva fright pulling on the ‘tail’, the part sticking out the tree, when it suddenly came loose and I found I wasn’t holding the tail, but the snakes head!
I managed to pull the whole thing out and measured it to more than 9ft. It would be a most terrifying thought to come across this guy still alive!
I did venture back to the wild dogs in the evening and they did actually go hunting at dusk. But 2 and a half hours later they were back at the den not having fed. The alpha pups as usual returned on their own after dark.
BB had joined the hunting party and now back at the den she had to take further abuse with a double dose of suckling from 12 hungry pups hanging on her body trying to milk her dry.
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