After a morning of making and marking a new transect and an afternoon pounding lumps of clay into powder ready to build stoves it’s back in to the forest. Armed with my poke-it stick and a head torch we march an hour deep into the jungle for a nocturnal herp sweep. I’m quietly chuffed with myself when I’m the first the find and catch a frog but ashamed when the most advanced classification I can give it is ‘frog.’ Full identification takes a few minutes and some toe splaying for webbing observation. The frog just hops off unperturbed when we’ve finished. Several frogs and a couple of snakes later I find a snake and decide to have a go at catching it. I pick it up and try to convince myself that even if it does bite it won’t be that bad. The snake wraps itself around my arm, tastes the air and then does a very smelly snake-poo on my hand. This really does wonders at managing to cancel out the considerable sense of achievement I was feeling at having caught my first snake.
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