A manageable mole snake

A few years ago, for reasons that I can no longer remember, I decided to get an African mole snake, Pseudaspis cana, from Linda Switzer. It had been decades since I had last had one and as I remembered them they were big and savagely defensive.

They were in no way pleasant creatures to keep. They had come, I think, from either Lofty Whitehead or Jonathan Leakey, both of Kenya. The snakes, adults all, had been wild collected, and were not the least bit hesitant to show their unhappiness about the situation. I was equally unhappy.

So when Linda mentioned having a "nice" mole snake my first question was "how nice?"

"Handleable," she said, "easily handleable."

I wondered to myself whether the snake was actually alive.

But I purchased it and when it arrived, it seemed in perfect health. Not only was it "handleable," it was docile. The big constrictor took thawed and warmed rodents eagerly but gently from forceps, and overall acted about as non-mole snake-like as any mole snake I had ever seen or heard of.

As the old saying goes, you can't judge a book by its cover. This was a lesson well learned with this very atypical African mole snake.

An overview of the Switzer snake. Mole snakes often darken as they mature. This example was typically irascible.

Author, photographer, and columnist Richard Bartlett is one of the most prolific writers on herpetological subjects in the 20th century. With hundreds of books and articles to their credit, Richard and his wife Pat have spent over four decades documenting reptiles both in the field and in captivity. For a list of their current titles, please visit their page in our bookstore.