Yesterday I visited the BioKen Snake Farm near Watamu. I went with Eva, a German volunteer, and two other guests from Germany. It was a really wonderful place, and our guide was exceedingly knowledgeable. He was able to fully understand and answer all of our questions, and he was also very pleasant. I learned a lot of interesting things about snakes. For example, some snakes digest their food with venom instead of saliva or other digestive juices. Some snakes can spit their venom up to 3 meters away (spitting cobras!). Boas are different from anacondas because one of them lays live young and the other lays eggs (can't remember which is which now...). I also held the species of snake that crawled into bed with me a couple weeks ago, and felt really badly that the one in my bed died because of me, since it is completely harmless.

This is the snake that was in my bed.

Eva really wanted to hold the python!

BioKen is really neat because it will go out on calls from people complaining about snakes and rescue the snake and often reimburse the person for whatever was lost. For instance, one farmer called in about a snake consuming one of his goats. When BioKen got there the goat was dead and mostly inside the snake, so they took the snake/goat to be released elsewhere and reimbursed the farmer for the goat. Really a neat system to encourage people not to kill snakes, which can be valuable for keeping down the rodent population, and thus disease transmission.

If anyone visits the Watamu or Malindi area, I would strongly encourage you to visit the snake farm. See more information here: http://www.bio-ken.com/

BioKen also has injured turtles, and they rear the eggs from the turtles mating and then release the young into the wild.

One of the spitting cobras, all the white slop on the glass is venom.

We got to hold a lot of snakes!

Yellow-flapped chameleon, very cool.