Snakes in Norway
Earlier this year, when Lucas and I were out in Bærum visiting some friends, we all went for a walk in the woods. I wasn’t watching my feet and ended up stepping on a snake, which startled me more than anything else, and made me feel extraordinarily bad for the tiny snake. Our friends were telling us how surprised they were and that they’d never seen a snake on the path before. I chalked this sighting up to Lucas’s eagle eyesight, which is what alerted us to the snake in the first place – a moment too late for me to avoid putting my foot down on it.
So it was even more disturbing when I spotted the second, and given the heightened tension of having just stepped on a snake, I instinctively shrieked like a little girl and waved my arms in the air. By the time we saw the third snake, I’d given up and was just quietly shuddering and staring at the ground as I walked.
We spent the rest of the walk discussing how two confident women could react so absurdly to such a little reptile (I wasn’t the only one shrieking and waving my arms), especially when we knew that it couldn’t possibly harm us.
When I mentioned the incident in my Facebook status, it spawned a lengthy discussion on snakes in Norway:
According to the sources I managed to find online, there are only three species of snakes native to Norway: the grass snake, the smooth snake, and the common viper (the only poisonous variety).
So getting on to what prompted this post (and a small flurry of activity in the international news media)… Perhaps it was Norway’s lack of snake species variety that prompted this crazy man to do what he did:
Customs find snakes taped to man
A man has been arrested in Norway after trying to smuggle 24 reptiles into the country by taping them to his body.
October 28th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Now that would make for a wiggly trip. Eeek!
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:16 am
I didn’t know there were ANY poisonous snakes in Norway! Thank you for educating me. And that guy, the snake smuggler—EWWWW. Cruel to the snakes, too.