Small snake, big commotion in Yishun

Hedy Khoo, The Electric New Paper 9 Dec 07;

THE teenager was studying on the upper floor of her parents' second-storey maisonette in Yishun, when she saw something green slithering past her window.

Said Tharsini Rajandran, 14: 'At first I thought it was a plant, but it turned out to be the tail of a green snake.'

It was climbing up a water pipe outside the window of her study room yesterday.

'I quickly closed the windows to prevent it from getting in,' said the girl. She then called her mother at work.

Mrs Shila Raj, 39, said: 'I immediately called my neighbour on the same floor, to check on my daughter.'

She applied for urgent leave and rushed home.

Her neighbour, Mrs Pamela Coasby, a housewife in her late 40s, said: 'When Shila called me, I thought it was probably something else.

'How can a snake come to a HDB area? But just in case, I closed all my windows,' she said with a laugh.

'Luckily I did, because there really was a green snake outside their window. It was frightening, especially when it lifted its head and I saw its fangs,' she added.

She alerted the town council and a three-man crew soon arrived to capture the unwanted visitor.

One man leaned out of the window and used a 3m pole with a metal hook to try to catch the snake, which had remained at the same spot for over two hours.

But the snake wriggled its way down the pipe and slid inside a sports shoe in a shoe rack, to the screams from onlooking neighbours.

Finally, one of the men pinned the snake under the metal hook, and the pest control company manager,

Mr Zaid Danil Bin Mahmood, 29, stepped on its head and put it into a white bag.

Mr Zaid recognised it as a grass snake, which is venomous.

Although its bite is not fatal, it can cause bad reaction in its victims.

'The grass snake is common around Singapore. This was a teenage snake, only a few months old,' he said with a chuckle.

This was the second grass snake he had caught in Yishun this year, he said, adding that it will be released in to the wild.