The main
part of my WINGS Marvelous Mato Grosso tour has come to an end, and it has been
a spectacular tour for birds and animals. It will be impossible to match this
one in future years, with such amazing sightings as Crested Eagle, Harpy Eagle,
and five different Jaguars, as well as an above-average bird list of about 490
species. But for me, it’s been particularly exciting to have had five snakes –
on a typical tour we’d see between zero and two, and I’d not necessarily get to
handle any of them. I was able to pick up three of these.
The first
might be the most interesting one for me, because I had no idea what it was. I
did know it was not something dangerously venomous – it was small, and a
“colubrid” (in the broader sense), and in the Americas you really have to be
wary only of snakes that are brown and blotchy and obviously viper-like or
colorful and obviously coral like (of course there are some corals that are
almost unicolor too, but they are easy to recognize). This tiny thing was
spotted by my participants as we completed a late afternoon and evening walk at
Pousada do Parque at Chapada dos Guimarães north of Cuiabá early in the tour.
It is either Sibynomorphus mikanii or
S. turgidus, and even the experts
seem to disagree on how to ID them. It specializes on feeding on slugs, and its
saliva is probably venomous to them. It would be in the family Dipsadidae were
that split from Colubridae, most members of which have some sort of mild toxin
in their saliva. If you could make it bite you, it might be something like a
bee sting.
At
Cristalino Jungle Lodge we had just one snake – this Boa constrictor, the only animal in the world that most people know
only by its scientific binomial. (Ocean Sunfish, also called Mola-mola (Mola mola), would be a contender, except
it’s also known by that English name.) The lodge groundskeepers found it while
weed whacking, and our boatman Waldirio saved it for us while we were out on
the trails. I was told by the bartenders to be very careful with this dangerous
snake, and of course it was more docile and less of a threat than any kitten
one wouldn’t normally think twice about holding.
I did not
pick up this gorgeous Bothrops
matogrossensis, the Mato Grosso Lancehead, which our driver Robson spotted
on our night drive at Pouso Alegre in the Pantanal. This is a pit-viper, and
probably dangerously venomous, and at the very least would deliver an extremely
painful bite. Members of the genus Bothrops
and related genera are often called “fer-de-lance,” a name perfectly
analogous to and equally useless as “sea gull.”
In this
close-up you can see the heat-sensing pit between the eye and the nostril,
hence the name pit-viper.
On a night
drive north of Porto Jofre we came across this large colubrid stretched out
across the road. I wasn’t sure of the species at first, but my friend Luis
Vicente, one of the owners of Pouso Alegre lodge, tells me it is Clelia plumbea, one of the several
species known as “mussurana.” I’ll call it Lead-colored Mussurana, just
translating the specific epithet. Interestingly, the musk of
this snake wasn’t the least bit disagreeable, actually being somewhat minty and
citronella-like.
.
Finally,
this Chironius laurenti, Bolivian
Sipo was on the road yesterday as we drove from Porto Jofre to Pousada Piuval,
our last lodge. It’s a very fast racer and probably very bitey, so I didn’t
attempt to catch it. We briefly saw one on the tour last year, but it vanished
before we got photos.
We’re headed
to Iguaçu tomorrow for a three-night extension – spending all of our time on
the Argentinean side of the border where the spelling changes to Iguazú. I
suspect we’ll add well over a hundred new species to the already huge bird
list.
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