A High Climbing Snake

Many birds will come flying around when it is feeding time for my ducks and chickens. This usually happens at around 11AM everyday. Not much of an eventful occasion, except for one fine sunny morning on 23rd April 2014. A fluttering sound caught my attention, and when I look up, I saw a sparrow with its head trapped between the jaws of a slender greenish/yellowish snake with dark shades. The snake must have launched a surprise attack from the hollow section of the pipe that makes up the orchid stand. With the snake's tail firmly gripping onto a bolt, it is impossible for the sparrow to escape. I would have never imagined that this is possible - a bird with maximum mobility being caught by a creature that has no limbs and slithers on the ground. This is a first for me.

By the time I had my camera in hand, the snake has already coiled its body around the head of the sparrow, as you can see in the picture above. It is now in the process of suffocating the bird. Incidentally, this is the same species of snake that I saw back in November 2012. It has the same colour, shade, pattern and, for some reason, a preference for high places.

The snake got away, by the way. It just drop the bird from its jaws and dashed into the foliage of my four-angle bean plant after the fireman (the official snake catchers in Malaysia) tried, and failed, to loop its head with a rope and hollow stick. A minute later, the snake just fell to the ground and disappeared into the fences, which, by now, is impossible to catch.

All along, I noticed that the snake did not try to defend itself. It did not go into a defensive pose like you would normally see with some venomous snake - a cobra for example. It just dashed off when threaten. From what I have been told by the fireman, this is a harmless snake. I was actually standing at about 3 feet away when the picture above was taken. It does not seemed to be bothered by my presence. Beautiful snake though, in my opinion. Anybody knows the name of this snake? I am no snake expert.