Boomslang’s and Carpet Vipers…. No thanks!
Boomslang are really timid, small as snakes go in this area and arboreal so they're not really a concern even though their venom is remarkably powerful and despite being rear fanged they can open their mouth to nearly 180deg. We don't get carpet vipers down this way, thankfully. We do have a few species of cobra on the farm and a surprisingly high number of puff adders. The puffy's like to chill out under my porch. For the most part the cobras steer clear of the places we tromp around.
We have encountered cape cobras, rinkhals (this one is technically not a "true" cobra but you'd never know the difference to see it) and black spitting cobras (not supposed to be this far east but they're definitely here). The snakes are one thing but the plants are a whole nuther' matter. Every bloody plant here is either really toxic in one or more of its parts or has thorns like 16-penny nails (the thorns come with their own special kind of hypodermically delivered hate from bacteria to poison to bugs) or, more often, both. I spent a lot of Wednesday pulling a nasty variety of thornbush out of one of my fields. You have to pull them out by the root and the thorns are gnarly and numerous. My hands are still a bit tender from 30 years of typing for a living, so while I'm rapidly building callouses I ended up with my hands tatood green and black from the thousands of thorn punctures I had to suffer through. At the end of that day we drove over to part of the farm where a seasonal stream was flowing in a nice deep cut in the rock and cooked some
boerwors over a fire while sipping on some suds. The beauty and quiet is unmatched. There are no airplanes flying over and no sounds of any kind of civilization and you can't see a telephone pole or power line from any spot on my farm so the tatood hands were totally worth it.
I'm fixin'a go on a hunt over the next few days. Picking up a couple friends and going out for red hartebeest, blue wildebeest and some springbok. I just ran out of biltong so I need to make some more. Hopefully 50kg of the stuff will hold me over till next year. Might make some
droewors.