Green mambas, puff adders and a few monster black mambas – it has been a busy period for snake catcher, Sarel van der Merwe.
It started off when a taxi driver called him about a black mamba on the road in Nosita, near Margate.
The mamba fled into a stormwater drain, and as they lifted the lid Sarel spotted it and caught it easily.
Sarel’s phone never stops ringing off the hook.
A few days later, Sarel was having lunch with his good friend Brian Brittion when he received a phone call about a black mamba in Gamalakhe.
The black mamba was in the bedroom of a house. It was so unhappy, it even lifted the bed up,” he said.
On Friday last week, Sarel drove about 170 kilometres to Santombe, inland from Harding to help a woman who had a black mamba lurking in her room.
“It was too late to travel on Thursday evening so I told her to close the door of the room and I’ll be there the following morning.”
After Brian’s recent experience of holding a black mamba, he decided to go along and they left on Friday at 5am.
“The last 20 kilometres of the road was very bad but we got there, and I went in and found the black mamba hiding in a cupboard between lots of clothes,” Sarel explained.
Sarel was on another lunch date with Andrea Rodrigues when he received a call about ‘two yellow snakes’ in Gamalakhe.
Intrigued, he ventured off, as he thought it was going to be two pythons.
But to his surprise, there was a puff adder under the roof sheets.
“I caught it and minutes later the locals spotted the other one,” he added.
Sarel said one normally finds puff adders inland.
“Puff adder venom is potently cytotoxic, causing severe pain, swelling, blistering and in many cases severe tissue damage. Polyvalent antivenom is effective and should be administered sooner rather than later. Fatalities are quite rare,” he said.
Then, last Sunday a woman phoned him from Sea Park, concerned that there was a ‘house snake’ hiding in her cupboard on the verandah.
“As I opened the cupboard, I spotted not a ‘house snake’ but a monster of a black mamba. I quickly closed the door and went to get my big bag,” he said.
Sarel said the mamba was a strong one and it was a wrestling match to get it into the bag.
He later caught a big green mamba at the horse stables at the Wild Coast Sun and then rescued a small water lizard from inside a house in Shelly Beach.
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