We stayed at Relais du Masoala for one afternoon and evening prior to taking a boat over to the Masoala Peninsula in the morning. We met our guide-to-be Armand in the afternoon. He asked us what we were looking for in particular and we told him lemurs, reptiles, and frogs. He assured us that it would be easy to find all of these, except for snakes. Snakes are very hard to find, he said; we would be lucky to see any snakes.

An hour or two later, walking back from the dining area after dinner, we found this guy coiled up at the edge of the deck in front of our room.

Henkel and Schmidt and some other references call this species Madagagascarophis colubrina.

Here is a list of all the reptiles and frogs I saw on this 2007 trip to Madagascar.

After being told by our guide Armand the previous day that we would have to be very lucky to see any snakes, we had seen a snake on the front deck of our lodge and a snake in my sister's bathroom. We almost tripped over snake number three here while returning to our bungalows from the dining area at Chez Arol after dinner.

Every night at Anjajavy I could count on finding at least one of these nocturnal snakes coiled up at the edge of the garden pond, staring longingly at the many tasty frogs therein.

Here is a list of all the reptiles and frogs I saw on this 2007 trip to Madagascar.

I keep a list of individual wild snakes I see, and my rule is that I get to count the same snake again if I see it on another day. So this snake counts separately from the ones seen the previous night around the same pond. My sister gave me a hard time about this, especially when I kept insisting on visiting the pond on each of our evening wildlife-spotting sojourns.

One of the same individuals seen on previous nights? You be the judge.

These snakes adapt well to various habitats. The ones I had seen on my previous trip were all on the ground, either next to a pond or coiled on my bungalow porch. This was the first one I saw up in vegetation.

Here is a list of all the reptiles and frogs I saw on this 2023 trip to Madagascar.

One in a stream; another in the leaf litter. They can be found most anywhere.

This species quickly became the default snake on this trip. If you saw a snake, it was reasonably safe to assume that it was one of these.

They're in the ponds; they're on the ground; they're in the trees; they're in the rainforest. And they're here in the drier forest too.

Here, there, and everywhere.

This was the only snake we saw in a couple of days in and around Isalo National Park, and it was the same default snake we had seen 10+ times already. Fortunately we saw lots of good lizards!