Oriental Wolf Snake

Description:

Serpentes; Colubridae; Colubrinae; Lycodon capucinus F.Boie, 1827. Early in the morning, my wife and I were having breakfast out in our terrace when my wife's facial expression suddenly changed and she said to me "What's that?". When I looked round, in the direction she was pointing, I saw it. A snake was resting between two balusters, just 5 or 6 feet from us. We both got the impression that it had come in from the front garden to shelter from the rain which had been pouring down all night. We knew that snakes are cold blooded and need to warm up in the morning before they can move around properly. So we were not too worried. The first thing I did was take a picture to enable identification later. Then we managed, because it was very torpid, to put it into a bucket with a lid. Later that morning, when it had stopped raining, we brought it to a little patch of forest and released it. The release was the scary part (this was back in 2016, long before we ever saw those wonderful snake catcher programs on Nat. Geo.). So, we just put the bucket on its side, on the ground and carefully prised open the lid and quickly stepped back several feet. The snake slowly emerged and disappeared into the grasses. We discovered later that the snake was only mildly venomous and there was never any serious danger.

Habitat:

This Oriental Wolf Snake was spotted in our terrace at around 6:30 am. According to Wikipedia, this snake likes rocky or grassy places and is partly arboreal, but is known to climb on the walls of buildings.