For nearly two months now, the people of Poland have been captivated by the tale of a missing 16-foot python that is believed to be slithering around Warsaw still. Read the rest

Mike Greene of Lattimore, North Carolina is a good neighbor. When the 88-year-old man down the street called Mike to help get a snake out of his toilet, he was happy to help. After all, he'd had plenty of practice.

"When I arrived, only the tail of the snake was visible, so I had to reach in and pull the snake out of the toilet," Greene says. "It was a very long black rat snake, about 6-feet-long. This was the sixth snake that I have removed from the same toilet in the past four years."

(WCNC)

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In the video below, a rooster in India tangles with a deadly cobra that can deliver enough venom in one bite to kill 20 people, and many more roosters. From National Geographic:

The rooster pushes the cobra away from the other chickens, sometimes dropping and pecking at it and sometimes running with the snake dangling from its beak. The bobbing movements of the rooster seem well-suited for this kind of fight, making it harder for the cobra to strike with its lethal venom.

At the end of the encounter, the rooster swallows the weakened snake whole, sliding the reptile into its beak as the creature’s muscles coil uselessly a couple more times.

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A 90-year-old woman in Mobile, AL wasn't going to let a venomous snakebite ruin her day. On her way to her weekly Crafty Critters club at church, Nell Toenes thought she saw a pretty leaf and picked it up. It turned out to be a snake that bit her in the hand. Read the rest

Jerry Kimball of Sioux Falls, South Dakota received a $190 ticket because he failed to put a leash on his pet boa constrictor, Lucy, when he took her to a park. “He was literally asking me to put a rope around my snake,” Kimball told The Argus Leader. “I was like ‘dude, no.’ I was dumbfounded.”

Animal Control Supervisor Julie DeJong told the paper that the ticket was appropriate. “Snakes fall under the same restrictions as cats and dogs,” she stressed. Read the rest

After going down a rabbit hole of watching snakes drinking water, I can say this is the best one: a two-headed albino snake, with one head fighting with the other on getting some water. NEED SNEK DRINX PLS BRO. Read the rest

Researchers in a southern Brazil grassland spotted a tarantula munching on a foot-long snake. It's the first time a tarantula having this particularly hearty meal has been documented in the wild. The non-venomous snake is a Erythrolamprus almadensis and the tarantula is a Grammostola quirogai that boasts .8-inch long fangs. Federal University of Santa Maria graduate student Leandro Malta Borges found the dining tarantula under a rock. From National Geographic:

As Borges looked on, the tarantula huddled over the decomposing snake, chowing down on the exposed, liquefied guts.

In their description of the scene, published in Herpetology Notes in December 2016, the researchers chalk up the snake’s demise to an accidental break-in. In Serra do Caverá, many tarantula species, in particular sedentary females, hide in the rocks.

“Most likely, the snake was surprised upon entering the spider’s environment and hence [was] subdued by it,” the researchers write.

(photo by Gabriela Franzoi Dri) Read the rest

The Texas Park and Wildlife Department recently posted this photo of a particularly stylish Western rat snake.

We mustache you to #lookclose – have you ever seen a snake with sunglasses?! Thanks to Karlie Gray for the great pics! pic.twitter.com/wjSZwUvKth

— Texas State Parks (@TPWDparks) October 19, 2016

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I think rubbing them was superfluous -- they seemed to be in a hurry to away. Read the rest

Waffle, a baby Shai-Hulud (terrestrial name: Kenyan sand boa), enjoys his new sandbox. His human companion, Jenny Gaines, says:

He's one of my "Reptile Ambassadors" in my educational reptile show business, Waffle & Friends Reptile Shows. My goal is public outreach to help spread understanding and appreciation of reptiles - especially snakes, who are so unfairly treated.

Why would Alcott Smith, at the time nearly seventy, affable and supposedly of sound mind, a blue-eyed veterinarian with a whittled-down woodman’s frame and lupine stamina, abruptly change his plans (and clothes) for a quiet Memorial Day dinner with his companion, Lou-Anne, and drive from his home in New Hampshire to New York State, north along the western rim of a wild lake, to a cabin on a corrugated dirt lane called Porcupine Hollow? Inside the cabin fifteen men quaffed beer, while outside a twenty-five- inch rattlesnake with a mouth full of porcupine quills idled in a homemade rabbit hutch. It was the snake that had interrupted Smith’s holiday dinner.

Because of a cascade of consequences there aren’t many left in the Northeast: timber rattlesnakes are classified as a threatened species in New York and an endangered species everywhere in New England except Maine and Rhode Island where they’re already extinct. They could be gone from New Hampshire before the next presidential primary. Among the cognoscenti it’s speculated whether timber rattlesnakes ever lived in Quebec; they definitely did in Ontario, where rattlesnakes inhabited the sedimentary shelves of the Niagara Gorge but eventually died off like so many failed honeymoons consummated in the vicinity of the falls.

That rattlesnakes still survive in the Northeast may come as a big surprise to you, but that they have such an impassioned advocate might come as an even bigger surprise. Actually, rattlesnakes have more than a few advocates, both the affiliated and the unaffiliated, and as is so often the case, this is a source of emotional and political misunderstandings, turf battles and bruised egos. Read the rest

The secretary bird looks and moves like I'd imagine a dinosaur looked and moved. Here is one giving a rubber snake the business.

From Reuters: "Scientists are studying the snake-hunting ability of the secretary bird from sub-Saharan Africa, which can kick a snake to death with a force five times its own body weight." Read the rest

A 4.5-foot copperhead snake, hidden in a tree, bit an employee at the Lowe's in in Denver, North Carolina. WPXI reports that "this could happen at any store that sells trees." Read the rest

Wouldn't you be too? (via Dangerous Minds)

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Troy Walker of Farmington, Utah was cooking dinner for a church function when she opened a can of green beans and discovered a snake's head inside!

“As I got closer to lift it off the spoon, I saw eyes," she told 60abc.com. "That’s when I dropped it and screamed."

The manufacturer, Western Family, promised to investigate.

I'd like to remind the reader that Walker was making food for church and that a snake is a symbol of the devil. Just sayin'.

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The Minnesotastan says: "One of my prized possessions is a walking stick that was hand-carved for me by an elderly man in Kentucky when I used to live and work there. The one above was carved by a craftsman in Oregon from a single stick of wood. Here is his video documenting the process."

Mike Stinnet made this copperhead walking cane. He has an Etsy store with other wondrous carvings and paintings. Read the rest

Tim Friede, 37, has been working on a snake venom vaccine for 16 years, allowing himself to be bitten by venomous snakes nearly once a month.

To prove his self-immunization theory works, Tim from Wisconsin, USA, recently took back-to-back bites from two of the world’s deadliest snakes – a taipan and a black mamba whose bite can kill in minutes. Unsurprisingly, his obsession with saving the tens of thousands of lives lost every year to snakebites has nearly killed him on a number of occasions and also cost him his marriage. His wife Beth Friede, 35, divorced him in October after 20 years together when she finally had enough of Tim’s snake obsession. Despite the controversial nature of his experiments Tim does have some backing from the scientific community. Dr Brian Hanley, a PhD Microbiologist from the University of California, says a test suggests Tim now has twice the number of antibodies and hopes his company Butterfly Sciences will help him develop his vaccine and find investors to get it into the field.