EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Snake on a Seat !

Powdered Tree Snake (Boiga pulverulenta), Family Colubridae
Monkoto, Democratic Republic of the Congo 

Explanation:  Yikes!  Watch where you sit! 

Early one morning in the central Congo River Basin in tropical Africa, I was alerted to a most interesting visitor.  

Sometime over the night, this snake had descended from its arboreal abode and took up residence in the slats of this chair in an open-air veranda.  

We were to hold a meeting there, and it might have been a surprise to us and our visitor alike, had not our local host spotted this squatter.  

This is a young Powered Tree Snake (also called Fischer's Cat Snake), which is actually relatively harmless, although we did not know this at the time and treated it with due caution as one should always do when encountering potentially deadly reptiles in the Afrotropical jungle.  

Powered Tree Snakes are mildly venomous with fangs in the rear of the mouth, used to subdue its prey of small rodents and tree-dwelling lizards.  When threatened, it inflates its body, but otherwise is a lithe, graceful, and skilled climber.  

Powered Tree Snakes are mostly nocturnal and hide in tree cavities and in dense foliage of epiphytes and creepers.  

This beauty of a reptile was actually quite a find, as they are not very common, especially young ones.  And apparently they are seldom photographed.

After we slowly, gently nudged it off the chair and back into the forest -- with a long stick! -- we proceeded with our meeting uninterrupted...  

But we learned the lesson of 
watching where you sit...

Acknowledgment
     My thanks to Olivier S. G. Pauwels, Gabon Country Manager of Smithsonian Institution's National Zoological Park for the identification.