WHENEVER snake rescuer Jason Arnold is called out to capture venomous snakes, he often has to make use of what’s around him to rescue, and remove said reptiles.

Yesterday was such a case where the Sunningdale resident was called out to a green mamba sighting in the uMdloti area.

Arnold was assisted and lifted to the top of a tree on the premises with the aid of a tractor loader backhoe (TLB) and managed to rescue the arboreal species.

Arnold explained it wasn’t his first time using whatever was around him to help with a rescue.

“I’ve had several calls where TLBs have been on site to help dig and move big rocks. However, this was the first time that I’ve been lifted up to a snake, using a TLB. In the past it’s only been ladders, cherry pickers and forklifts. With this call-out, it was extremely time consuming. I think I spent around three and a half hours trying to get to the mamba which was up in the trees above workers at a construction site.

“Although we used the TLB where we could, the branches of the trees, which were interlinked kept getting in the way and the snake kept moving. So there would be times where the TLB would lift me to a certain point and I had to climb the rest. That happened multiple times, but thankfully in the end I got the mamba with a few scratches and bruises,” he said.

Arnold added that over 90% of his Green Mamba call-outs are within 300m of the beach.

“Green mambas are mostly restricted to coastal forest areas of Durban, with only a couple very small pockets being an exception. uMdloti is one of those areas where most of my calls for green mambas come from,” he said.

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