Boom Boom Spring Is Here!

I know it has been months since my last post and I do apologise... I promise to try harder!!

Our winter came and went and we did have some rain, I am happy to say. Not a lot, but enough to allow our restrictions to be lifted... although I sincerely hope that we do not regret this later! Our dams are now at the 70% level which is pretty good, but once we are allowed to use water freely again, who knows.

But this is about Spring and the things it brings!
The boom boom bit is for the sound that my heart made one day about two weeks ago.

Read on!!

There I was happily pottering in the garden one morning when suddenly the sound of starlings broke through my thoughts, and looking round to see why and what, I glanced at the lampost where we have a nesting log attached. And saw what looked like a sausage in the entrance/exit hole.

Interesting! (All photos thanks to Rob)

The parent birds were frantic, flying and diving and as I watched, the sausage moved.... and I realised that it was a snake with it's head inside the log, taking one of the two baby starlings that were almost at flying stage.

The head is inside the hole. 

I yelled for Rob, he came running (I am sure half the village heard me yell actually), and we gathered up the cats, much to Kindle's annoyance as she was quite interested in the whole thing, closed the doors, blocked the cat-flap and went into the kitchen to observe from a safe distance.
The snake finally emerged from the hole with one of the fledglings in her mouth (we later identified it as a female boomslang), calmly stretched down to the salie bush, wound her way into the middle of it.... and disappeared!

The bird is firmly in the mouth!

But, the story didn't end there.

A few days later Rob noticed a snake lying in the road outside our house. It was trying to move and we realised that it had been run over by one of the three cars that had just driven past. Sadly it was dead and there was nothing that we could do except move it, as we didn't want more cars to run it over. We also thought that something would eat it, either a kite or a mongoose. So Rob carefully lifted it with a rake and put it into the grass over the road. It was also a female boomslang and we were wondering if it was the same one coming back for seconds, or leaving after having digested the first bird.

But....dead or not, it ended up outside our house again! We were puzzled and confused!

And then we saw why! Sitting on the wall was a mongoose! It had found the snake and had dragged it across the road, obviously take-away supper for the family! But he left it there as I think it was too big for him and also it was no longer fresh and very smelly by then!

So Rob buried it the next morning.

Fortunately boomslangs are shy and prefer to stay away from trouble unlike a cobra, so I wasn't too worried.

But I did abandon my gardening for a few days!