A wolf snake: Not poisonous

New Delhi, Aug. 12: Politics may be a snakepit but politicians are not the only people who have been hissing at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

A couple of snakes recently slithered out of nowhere at his 7 Race Course Road residence, forcing security personnel adept at dealing with bigger threats to scurry to a wildlife NGO for help.

It ultimately emerged that the snakes that looked suspiciously like the poisonous kraits were actually a harmless variety called wolf snakes, although they had enlarged front teeth on both jaws.

“Two snakes were rescued from the Prime Minister’s house recently. They were wolf snakes. As they look similar to the krait, people think they are poisonous. But they are harmless,” Baiju Raj, a herpetologist who deals with reptiles and amphibians, said.

Snakes over, it was the turn of a monkey to cause panic at Singh’s home last Friday.

“We got a call from the Prime Minister’s house on Friday about an injured monkey. But the monkey escaped by the time we reached there,” Baiju said.

A month earlier, it had been an injured parakeet that the NGO rescued from Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit’s house.

“On an average, we get 2,000 calls a year. This year, we have got over a 1,000 since January,” Baiju said.

These wildlife “rescue workers”, who are only a tinkle away, land up in vans or on bikes to carry away all kinds of snakes, toddy cats and even the odd monitor lizard. The heartening thing is that most snakes, barring the cobra and the krait, are non-poisonous.

“The capital has species like sand boa, red sand boa, wolf snake, rat snake, pythons and cat snake. We recently got a call from a house in south Delhi where there was a krait in the cupboard,” Baiju said.

A Wildlife SOS official, Kartick Satyanarayan, said the increase in the number of snake sightings, be it at Singh’s home or in huge farmhouses, could be because of rampant construction in Delhi.

“Large-scale development could be destroying the habitat of snakes, forcing them to come out,” he said.