Farmers are very athletic. Wayan, my Bali host, asked one of the farmers, who was taking a rest from plowing the rice paddy (a stones throw from her house), if he would climb up a coconut tree outside my balcony and cut off some large palm leaves that were hitting the roof. He got a bamboo ladder to go 2/3rds of the way up and then shimmied up the rest with his scythe. All famers have one tuck into the back of their pants, blade out. How was he going to chop off a huge palm frond once he got to the top of the ladder? When he shimmied up, to reach the frond, how could he hold on to the palm tree trunk and cut off the huge frond at the same time? It would be awhile until I found out.
Near the top trunk, the farmer became very agitated and Wayan and a farmer friend on the ground came to see what was the matter. They quickly got the ladder back in place and he rocketed down. Then he came into the house and up the stairs with a bamboo pole onto my deck and started to poke around in the coconut treetop he just descended. Besides the coconut that fell, there were two snakes that came down! One was over 9 feet long (3 m) and the other over four feet long (1 1/3 m).
Wayan started to hold her head and look away as the farmer on the ground banged the snake with another bamboo pole in a very ineffectual way. I asked Wayan if they were poisonous and she said no, but she didn’t know for sure. I felt terrible for the snake. They eat rats and mice that live in coconut trees! She explained that Balinese people kill snakes that they happen upon.
They dug a hole and put the snakes inside after they stopped moving. They must have known that they were still alive because a tail would twitch now and then, but they tried to ignore that. Then they put some banana leaves over them and would have put soil on top to smother them or perhaps allow them to escape? Unfortunately, the big snake crawled out of the hole and got another ineffectual beating. The small snake was dead. They had a hoe that could have chopped off its head. It seemed that they preferred to not directly kill the snakes, if possible.
Finally, it was safe for the farmer to climb to the top of the tree and I got my questions answered concerning how he would get the leverage to cut down the frond. As you can see in the photo, he laid on top of the fronds first and then cut the frond.
I watched the snake burial ground later for evidence of an escape, but there was sadly, none.Does anyone know what kind of a snake they were? Were they poisonous?
