Going to the Moon

I have this picture for a while and it seems so co-incidental that 'everybody is going to the Moon'. The body in the picture is of a young python (งูเหลือม) (about 1.5 metre long) climbing a rainguage pole and reaching out for the Moon.

 

Pythons are quite common in Dreamland. There are a few living in my place. They usually sleep in daytime and hunt for food at night. (Mot snakes are 'solar powered'; they need sunlight to charge up and so most are day-hunters.) They help us keep rats, possums, and lizards away from the house. Pythons are not venomous but they can bite and give us nasty infections. But they only bite when they are scared and cornered. Generally, they are not aggressive. They usually slither out of our way (given them enough time).

Compare to 'possums in the roof' (on the roof as in 'fiddlers on the roof' means 'on top of the roof'; in the roof means under the roof but over the ceiling), we would prefer to have pythons in the roof.

We do have other kinds of snakes : venomous ones like (red belly) black snakes, brown snakes, and taipans; non-venomous ones like yellow tree snakes (on our fruit tees), water snakes (eating small fish in our dams), ... We also have a kind of legless lizards looking like short stumpy yellow snakes hiding under ground surface beneath piles of dry leaves and mulchings.

We had lost 2 dogs to snake bites because they chased and tried to kill venomous snakes. (The vet's fees were also painful on top of losing our dogs by snakes' bites ;-) But we have many more dogs died of old age in the 20 years we live in Dreamland. We are mindful that there are venomous snakes around and careful not to frighten them or corner them. So far, snakes will go their ways if we let them! It is better to go our ways and let snakes quietly accept us as a part of their world.