Hydrus, Sinuous Snake

4 Dec 2016

Yesterday morning on my early morning walk, I met a Cape cobra on the path. It was absolutely terrifying. The Cape cobra is one of the deadliest snakes in Africa; drop for drop its venom is one of the most potently neurotoxic, a particularly unpleasant way to be dispatched to the stars.

As anyone living in the bush knows, snakes are never far away in Africa. But you seldom see them. Most, bar the sluggish puff adder, sense your arrival from the vibration of your footsteps and slither silently out of your way. Thus the likelihood of encountering a snake is minimal, and the chance of being bitten is even smaller.

I had just crested a low, heavily grassed sand dune; the cobra was lying on the path and I clearly startled it because it rose up and spread its hood in typical and iconic cobra fashion. It was so close I could have reached out and patted it on its head. I froze in mid-step. Didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. (And because I wasn’t so sure how cobras feel about eye contact, I used averted vision to look at it.)

Luckily, a little respect goes a long way with a Cape cobra. It examined me for a long time (pretty much the rest of my life, come to think of it) then it decided I wasn’t a threat. It lowered its hood, dropped its body back to the ground, wound its way into the grasses, and was gone.

After seeing the Cape cobra at such close quarters, the early morning sun gleaming on his golden body, I can appreciate that herpetologists find beauty in their form and scales, but I prefer our celestial snakes.  

Seeing a different water snake in the sky 

It was a beautiful night last night, the stars were a spectacular display of sparklers. As I always do, I enjoyed a cup of tea while I waited for my eyes to dark adapt, idly gazing at the stars. Lying sandwiched between the two Magellanic Clouds, Hydrus, our little water snake constellation, has always appeared to me as the lovely triangle it is usually depicted as in star atlases. I like geometry, so I enjoy the geometric asterisms in the sky, this triangle in particular.

I was looking at the triangle – and then… in a flash…

… the triangle was gone and the water snake appeared! 

It’s always a surprise when a new and completely different picture is revealed hiding within the pictorial world we thought we were looking at. Ah-ha! That’s not a star-map triangle, it’s the real Hydrus… the rearing snake, with its head erect and its body twisted into a sinuous shape!

Of course it was a given that I began my night’s observing with a tour through the celestial snake’s sinuous curves.