A Dangling Snake in a Kenyan Tree House

A true story of a snake encounter in East Africa/ Climate thoughts during the hottest month modern man has seen

Photo by Bhavin Joshi on Unsplash

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This summer month, I’m showcasing snakes, the maligned and often-feared reptile, but also one that has a scaled and patterned beauty. They like warmer weather, and I’ve seen a few of them on recent walks.

Garter snake, Photo by Robin Applegarth

Snakes have stunning navigational skills even without any appendages. Try climbing a tree or racing through uneven terrain without arms or legs!

Below, I tell the story of a snake encounter over 40 years ago. I recently read my journal of that trip and referred to it for details. Keep in mind the cultural changes from then to now. Kenya was a country recently released from colonialism in the 1970s.

Warning—if you are snake-phobic, you may want to skip this next part. Also, please leave snakes alone and don’t chase them as I did. 😏

Robin A.

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AFTER LIVING TWENTY YEARS in the Southern California desert, I've had many snake encounters. Snake stories have to be shared, so neighbors and family would often tell of a recent snake experience when we gathered around our outdoor fire pit on a cool evening.

It was a snake encounter on a different continent, though, which most sticks in my memory.

In 1975 I visited Kenya in East Africa for four months. I arrived in Nairobi, the capital, about a week before my birthday, staying with family friends who worked for the UN. To celebrate my birthday, a friend and I went out for spicy Indian food, followed by a visit to the Nairobi Snake Park.

Decades later, I can't remember why I chose that destination. Still, it was a tourist site, and it introduced me to some of the many snakes of East Africa. An orientation to the region's snakes was necessary since I would later be camping, sleeping on the ground, and in a primitive tree house.

A museum for African snakes

As we toured the Snake Park, moving from glass cage to glass cage, we could see snakes of all sizes, colors, and intricate patterns—from hooded cobras, puff adders, and boomslangs to the dreaded black mamba, one of the world’s deadliest snakes.

I especially paid attention to the venom rating, and was surprised to see so many highly poisonous ones. There are four types of snake venom worldwide, but the most deadly one is neurotoxic, and many snakes we viewed held that toxic power.

As I rounded the corner of the snake cages and reached the end, there were a handful of snakes from other continents. One of them was the familiar North American rattlesnake, whose scientific name Crotalus comes from the Greek word for castanet, named after the buzzing tail rattle they give as a warning. I had encountered dozens of rattlesnakes near my California desert home. Their hemotoxic venom was less severe and not as deadly as neurotoxic snakes. It felt like I was visiting an old acquaintance whom I now saw in a more favorable light, and I almost wanted to pat its triangular head.

A week or so later, after getting fitted out with sturdy safari clothes, my friend and I set off for an open-air tree house near Tsavo National Park, in Kenya’s Southern Rift Valley. The tree house consisted of three plywood platforms in a large gamble flame tree, with a roof built over the upper level.

Six people could stay in the large tree, sleeping high off the ground and away from nighttime dangers such as lions and hyenas. It was the camping base for a small gemstone mining operation nearby run by two British brothers we knew. We stayed there for several weeks.

Reptiles on the bed

One morning I was kneeling on my sleeping bag, looking at my passport. Suddenly, two shiny black lizards with yellow stripes darted by about 18 inches from my knees. A slender, bright green snake over two feet long was closely chasing them. Shocked by this reptile parade on my bed, I left the tree house and quickly scrambled down the ladder. The lizards and the snake were also headed down the main tree truck.

The snake, perhaps scared by my movements, retreated back up onto a branch while the lizards reached the safety of the ground. My heart was pounding by now, and I remembered the prevalence of venomous snakes here, including a bright green one in the Snake Park called the Eastern green mamba. Was a highly venomous snake living in the tree where five of us slept? Or was it a non-poisonous snake? I was alone at the tree house camp for the day but decided to try to get the snake to leave, as we didn't have any other place to sleep safely.

I found a broken four-foot branch and reached up to encourage the snake to move down to one of the lower branches with the aim of pushing it onto the ground. (If you're thinking "bad idea" here, you're right.) It smoothly swiveled around my stick and climbed higher. I climbed the ladder to follow it, but it moved even higher. At the same time, it seemed to be watching the ground for the lizards it had been hunting before I interrupted it.

The YouTube video above shows an African green mamba in motion. It also has an interesting sound background of African insects, frogs and birds.

A snake chase around a flame tree

The snake I was chasing would periodically slither back down onto a low-hanging branch and hang there as if teasing me to catch it. It moved with sinuous grace, stretching smoothly across air gaps between tree branches as if weightless. I marveled at the muscularity and balance of a legless and armless creature that could climb trees adroitly and seemingly defy gravity.

We played cat and mouse for another forty minutes. When I had finally chased the snake onto the ground, it took cover in a crevice of a stone wall that was part of our outdoor kitchen. There, it stared at me with bright, beady eyes, and we regarded each other for a minute silently. Suddenly, a finger-long lizard ran between us, and the snake darted in my direction, biting down on the middle of the lizard. The lizard flailed for a few seconds, then went limp, and the snake turned it around to gulp it down.

While I paused over this life-and-death drama, the snake swiftly climbed back up a low-hanging tree branch and turned to face me before I could stop it. It seemed to show me its arboreal nature— the tree and our tree house were its chosen habitat, and nothing I could do would keep this creature out of it. Every time I tried to guide the snake out of the tree, it would maneuver back into the higher branches. It was fast and agile and I was clumsy in comparison.

At one point I found myself staring eye to eye with this green wizard of movement, who now had a higher position over me. I suddenly (and finally) realized this might be a neurotoxic snake since it had immobilized the lizard so quickly. It was now within two seconds of being able to drop onto me if it wanted to. A cold wave of fear washed over me as we stared at each other, and I slowly backed off, laying my stick down in surrender. I sat down to watch it while I sipped a warm Fanta and waited for the others to return.

To sleep— with or without a reptile

A couple of hours later, the four other campers trudged back to camp. I told them of the green snake adventure, announcing that I would spend the night inside the Land Rover rather than in the tree house. They listened but decided there was a chance the snake had left our tree (I doubted that), so they all climbed into their sleeping bags at nightfall and went to bed. I spent an uncomfortable night on the cramped, corrugated metal floor of the Land Rover.

The next morning we all got up and started fixing breakfast— British-style fresh chapati bread cooked on a fry pan over the campfire and topped with guava jelly. A couple of African workers from the mine walked up the dirt road to collect firewood for us. After glancing up, one of them suddenly pointed to the roof of the tree house and shouted, "Nyoka, nyoka!" The green snake was hanging over the roof's edge of the sleeping platform where the people had been.

The native Africans had a healthy fear of snakes, and no one wanted to pursue it, but finally, three of the men climbed up into the tree while those of us on the ground "spotted" the snake's whereabouts. After a fifteen-minute chase around the branches, they trapped it under a stick, whacked it until dead, then threw it to the ground where we examined it. Our British friend who had lived in Kenya for years pronounced it a venomous "green mamba."

I felt bad for the snake. Encounters with humans rarely go well for them. But I've remembered the slender, lime-green snake with dark eyes, its sinuous and graceful movement through air and tree limbs, and its forbearance and lack of aggression towards me as I pursued it. It could have swifly struck out at me when we were close, but it did not. We both chose that tree for habitat, but the humans prevailed and the mamba lost.

I later recounted this incident to my children, and it became known in our family's history as the "Mama and the Mamba" tale.

That snake taught me about the nature of arboreal creatures, who instinctively seek the protection of trees as a safe harbor. The concept of home and safe places even lives in the body of an agile green mamba.

Robin Applegarth

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Thoughts about climate:

Earth should be our safe place, but it’s becoming less so the more we fill the air with greenhouse gases and destabilize the climate. The innocent pleasures of summer are giving way more often to the dread of heat, fires and heavier storms.

Climate news has been hitting hard all month, with the hottest temperatures Earth has seen in over 120,000 years, East coast flooding from severe storms, and increasing deaths worldwide related to climate calamities.

The whole country of Iran shut down for two days in early August when temperatures soared and the power grid was stressed. The Persian Gulf International Airport reached 149 degrees F.

If this makes you feel like you need or want to DO something more to help, good for you! A lot of people are in that place, so I’m working on a post about how we can step up and make a difference. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, one source of deeper climate conversations occurs at The Good Grief Network.

It’s important to talk with more people about this growing climate emergency. It’s also helpful to know we still have the ability to change things for the better. Every tenth of a degree of heat we prevent is a win, every ecosystem we help to stay functioning is a win, every food crop we can grow in a hotter climate is a win. Let’s get creative and focus on what we CAN do.

In order to create a social tipping point of influence, we now need millions of people to put pressure on governments and corporations to act more swiftly and responsibly. Individuals also have many actions we can take to lessen our damage on the planet. Will you be one of those who steps up to help? If so, thanks from all life on Earth.🌎 💚

And finally, you can read Ben Okri’s powerful poem, Earth Cries here. The beginning of the last stanza starts with this:

No gods will get us out of this.
We are the gods that must do it.
We are the gods that must step up
To the biggest crisis in the history
Of human consciousness as we know it.

Mahatma Gandhi’s quote lives in my kitchen as a daily reminder, Photo by Robin Applegarth

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I like to hear from readers!

Do you have a memorable snake encounter? Or, what’s on your mind this month related to Mother Earth and climate?

You can comment at the button above, respond to your subscriber email to reach me privately, or reach out on Twitter @RobinApplegarth. If you liked this article, hit the heart ❤️button at the bottom or top as it helps more people find it on Substack. Thank you to readers who have referred the Mother E newsletter to friends and shared on social media!

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