Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s previous World of Wonder columns can be found here.
There’s almost three feet of ice-snow pack on the ground where I live, Dear Ones. I am so thirsty for color. I just painted my nails “Tidal Wave.” Desperate times, desperate measures, folks. Cabin fever and winter-weariness affects so many of my friends and students who, like me, are NOT skiers and would rather not be outside in the negative nine-degree weather. So it’s no surprise this week’s column features an animal known for its burst of chartreuse green, and for sounding like a forgotten superhero: the green mamba (Dendroaspis angusticeps).
I had heard of this snake because of course it’s always trotted out on those “deadliest animals” shows on cable. But last month, while I was teaching a month-long class in UNC-Wilmington’s astounding creative writing program, I happened upon the Cape Fear Serpentarium. I couldn’t resist the rickety wooden sign and, once inside, the creeping and the slithering (although truthfully, since most of the creatures inside are nocturnal, the slithering was fairly rare on a morning visit). For my money, the serpentarium’s jeweled star was the diurnal green mamba, swish-and-sliding around to get a better look at the gaping visitors who ooohed and ahhhed over his bright color—by far the brightest snake in the entire building. I just haven’t been able to stop thinking about the dazzling green of the green mamba—the likes of which I’ve simply never seen before on this planet.
When I say the mamba is green, I mean:
Photo by Herman Pijpers, via Flickr
See why I was drawn to this green during one of the bleakest winters in recent memory? This is some serious apple green. Kermit the Frog green. Grass green. Green mambas grow to about six to seven feet long and are found in southeast Africa, usually preferring the shade of the dense branches of a cashew or mango tree. Mamba heads are flat and said to be ‘coffin-shaped’ and the green mamba’s head is no exception, but it also has a particularly defined canthus—the ridge from the snake’s nostril up along where you’d almost expect an eyebrow to rest above their vibrant (unblinking) yellow eye.
Skip to 1:05 to get a taste of the mamba in motion and its fierce eyes. But caution to the squeamish if you watch longer than that—a real?/simulated bite happens and I don’t want you to scream and scare your co-workers!
When newly hatched, the baby snakes are practically a ridiculous shade of turquoise, but don’t let that beauty draw you too close. The green mamba’s venom can kill a person in just over a half an hour after working to halt your lungs. Which is why, in this very rare instance in this column, I was perfectly content to have a nice thickness of glass separating me and that bright ribbon as it stretched and fussed over just where he might decide to settle in that day for an afternoon nap.
And now it’s your turn, Dear Ones: What animal have you been lucky and amazed to observe from behind the safety of a pane of glass? Let me know in the comments below!
Tags: aimee nezhukumatathil, green mamba, the butter, world of wonder
I have never seen one IRL, but the most colorful, festive, weird animal has got to be the nudibranch. They are crazy sea slugs that come in every shape and color. I highly recommend an immediate google search.
Those are so pretty!
This snake is BEAUTIFUL. Love you, snakes. But yeah, no touching the venomous ones. TWO stories (two for one…Thursday? Anyway):
1) I used to work at a pet store. I made friends with most of the animals, particularly the ferrets, but also the snakes. Please note, we did NOT sell cats or dogs, but pretty much everything else was fair game. (Dear god, the puns today.) So we got two baby boa constrictors in one day, and after giving them about a week to get adjusted to hanging out in their new place, I decided to take them for a walk around the store. This was totally encouraged – it gave shoppers a chance to “meet” animals, and it gave me a chance to hang out with them. Win! I had just finished letting them hang on to me (one lazily looped over each arm), when a woman comes around the corner. She froze. She screeched. I lost feeling in both my arms. I had to sort of grit my teeth and quietly say, “It’s okay, ma’am, they won’t hurt you, but they are hurting me, so if you could just go around the corner, I’ll put them back and come help you…” She just nodded and fled.
2) In high school, I went with my mom to a Ren Faire, and there was a group visiting from a bird of prey rescue group. We watched gleefully as they brought out all kinds of different birds, explaining what they were, what their condition was, etc etc. Finally, they pulled out a (very) big bald eagle. It was the only bird they brought out that was wearing a hood. They finished talking about her, and finally someone piped up, “Why is it hooded? Can you take the hood off?” The bird rescuers hesitated, then said, “Well, okay, but the only reason we can is because we have a tether on her to make sure she can’t fly off. These bigger eagles are very predatory, so we have to be careful in situations where there is available prey.” This fact didn’t register until they took the hood off. This massive, gorgeous eagle sort of shrugged, started looking around, and then LOCKED ON to this tiny little girl standing right next to my mom. It took a minute for the handler to realize what was happening, but wow that bird got re-hooded so fast. So that is my “gee, I’m glad there are professionals/walls here” story.
That second story reminds me of a couple of years back, when I was staying with my cousin. I was out on the road (tiny country-town dead-end street, no real danger from cars) with her three daughters and some of the neighbourhood kids, keeping an eye on the youngest girl, who was only a toddler. One of the wedge-tailed eagles that lived in the valley came swooping along, and then sat there, hovering about fifteen feet above my head. I looked up at it and it was just eyeing up the little one. I could practically see the cogs turning in its head. I said don’t even think about it, mate. It kind of looked at me with its head cocked, hovered for another minute or so, and then wheeled off. I was so relieved.
Nature, man. Like my babysitting ability isn’t dodgy enough without adding scheming birds of prey into the mix.
I read Roald Dahl’s “Going Solo” at a probably too young age, and the green mamba features in one of his stories and I was TERRIFIED of them for years. Combined with reading “The Tale of the Speckled Band”, I had years and years of nightmares of snakes slithering into my room in the middle of the night and killing me. Never mind that I lived in a place without any poisonous snakes…
Just a few weekends ago, I was at the zoo and got to watch a bunch of California condors hunting and eating a squirrel. It was SUPER cool, but I was very glad to be behind glass- those birds are HUGE.
Thinking back, a lot of Dahl’s stories feature pretty freaky snakes. There’s that one where an old man lives with an obnoxious young man and a giant snake comes and steals milks from their cow (?!) The old man chooses the snake over the young man (as in he *has* to kill one of them, what else could he do, find the kid another job? Ridiculous! Hand me that shovel.)
And that other one where a kid is playing “the carpet is covered in snakes” and imagines it so hard it’s really ambiguous if he survives or not.
Did a snake once mug Ronald Dahl or something?
It wasn’t a particularly dangerous animal (unless being killed with cuteness qualifies), but I still have fond memories of parking myself outside the otter exhibit at the National Zoo for a solid half-hour, just watching them run and dive and act ridiculous.
Fun fact: all the National Zoo otters are named after food, except one…whose name is Kevin.
OTTERS! OTTERS ARE THE BEST! And Kevin is a solid name for an otter.
I had a brief volunteer gig a couple summers ago as a river otter interpreter at the local aquarium. The sole inhabitant was an elderly female otter. Her male companion had died a few weeks previously. I had visitors come up to me and ask in hushed tones, “Is she doing okay now that her boyfriend is gone?” (NB: They never actually mated. No little otters resulted from their shacking up.) “She must be so lonely,” they said.
No, I said to them. She was more active and energetic than any of the staff had seen her in a long time. If you just wait a few minutes, she might come out and torpedo around in the water, as otters do. Apparently she was delighted to have the place to herself at last without that weird dude hanging around eating half the food and getting up in her space.
Somehow I thought the Toast collective needed to hear this story.
That story is the best story, and I only hope she had (or is having) many, many years of old-lady-otter solitude ahead of her.
She’s since retired from the active exhibit area (though still apparently in pretty good health) and is in her luxury otter retirement villa behind the scenes. Two young females have since moved in and made themselves at home. These are all rescue animals, likely orphaned when too young to survive on their own.
OTTER GIRL POWER!
OTTER RETIREMENT VILLA
I love everything right now.
This snake is gorgeous! I can remember seeing SUPER DEADLY poison dart frogs in a glass cube in San Francisco (at that museum with the rainforest thing – I can’t remember the name) and that was awesome but still scary!!
I remember seeing some poison dart frogs at the St. Louis zoo-they were so little and cute, and so many different colours! Bright sky blue, green like that mamba, sunflower yellow, bright orange, and they had the cutest, curious expressions on their faces as they watched all of us humans watching them. Glad there was glass there, though.
A couple weekends ago I was right, and I do mean right, on the other side of the glass from a barred owl. It was pretty great.
When my nephew turned 3 we had a pirate party for him (just a family BBQ in the back yard). He kept talking about his Pirate Parrot that came for his Pirate Party! After a while we looked up and there was a parrot in the tree. We live in Seattle, so this is not exactly normal. It belonged to someone in the neighborhood and had escaped that day.
Ruffed lemurs at Happy Hollow Zoo! They were hanging all over the observation wall of their huge enclosure and slobbering down the glass while staring at us, whooping like crazy every time a car alarm in the parking lot went off and scaling the zookeeper who came in to feed them in order to take flying leaps off the poor woman’s head. It was like watching a classroom of ADHD seven-year-olds high as kites on Mountain Dew.
Not brightly colored, but if you go to the Great Lakes Zoological Society in Ann Arbor, MI, you can see a goliath bird-eater tarantula. Named Mama Cass. Brrrr, giant tarantula.
Very brightly colored, and possible to see up close and personal, are the peacocks that roam freely around the Detroit Zoo. Often great for a photo op.
Except that I lied, you can’t go to the GLZS, they just closed. http://www.glzszoo.org
This gives me a sad.
Damn it all, I lived in A2 for 7 years and never even knew this existed? Sad face.
scary-beautiful things luckily behind glass?
probably for me it’s the spider crabs at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. Those things are so fascinating looking but also terrifying and hideous. eurgh!
(I love almost everything at the GA, and highly recommend a visit. the Beluga whales are stunning, and the giant Imax-size viewing window into the aquarium is breathtaking, especially to see the whalesharks, which don’t live in many aquariums because they need so much space)
I lived as a kid in West Africa for a while, and at one point a green mamba was discovered in our backyard and that was one of the nightmares of my childhood. Like everyone else of our (not especially high) income level at that time, since it was a dangerous town, we had a guard at the gate to our house who doubled as the person who would kill less dangerous snakes for us (he had a stick with a forked end just for that – he sometimes showed me as a little kid), but when we found the green mamba we had to call in specialists to kill it. Those snakes are terrifying! They like to DROP OUT OF TREES ONTO YOU if they feel threatened! They are nervous snakes too, so they are very very risky. Sure they are pretty but no no no no.
The west African ones are also a little less pretty — they are a little more yellowy green. But just as poisonous.
They are not endangered so please do not feel sad that we killed ours. 😮
I lived as a kid in West Africa for a while, and at one point a green mamba was discovered in our backyard and that was one of the nightmares of my childhood. Like everyone else of our (not especially high) income level at that time, since it was a dangerous town, we had a guard at the gate to our house who doubled as the person who would kill less dangerous snakes for us (he had a stick with a forked end just for that – he sometimes showed me as a little kid), but when we found the green mamba we had to call in specialists to kill it. Those snakes are terrifying! They like to DROP OUT OF TREES ONTO YOU if they feel threatened! They are nervous snakes too, so they are very very risky. Sure they are pretty but no no no no.
The west African ones are also a little less pretty — they are a little more yellowy green. But just as poisonous.
They are not endangered so please do not feel sad that we killed ours. 😮
I absolutely adore snakes, and once saw an albino diamondback rattle snake in an excellent herpetarium in the southern US. They’re heavy-bodied and beautifully marked, and this albino one was shades of yellow and cream. Gorgeous.
I absolutely adore snakes, and once saw an albino diamondback rattle snake in an excellent herpetarium in the southern US. They're heavy-bodied and beautifully marked, and this albino one was shades of yellow and cream. Gorgeous.
California Academy of Sciences!
I adore Emerald Tree Boas and Rainbow Boas, but I have had the privilege of handling a Rainbow – she was pretty cranky though, I’m glad I wore gloves
I adore Emerald Tree Boas and Rainbow Boas, but I have had the privilege of handling a Rainbow – she was pretty cranky though, I'm glad I wore gloves