'One bit me on the face': Learning to love snakes at Chester Zoo

Contorting, writhing and flexing its muscular girth around my legs, a red flick knife of a tongue darts and probes just inches from my knees. My task is ostensibly simple: to lay my hands on the glossy, iridescent skin of this 6ft-long black python to check for flakiness. Instead, I take a sizeable step away from it, backing up slowly against another tank in the spartan, brightly lit “back stage” lab room at Chester Zoo’s tropical reptile house.

“Look out for that fella,” I’m warned. Turning around I see that said tank is occupied by a Gaboon viper recovering from a kidney operation, which has a childlike bandage on its lower back to prove it.

Iri Gill, the endlessly patient deputy curator of lower vertebrates and invertebrates at Chester Zoo, manages to guide the energetically writhing python towards his lower body instead of my own, using a worryingly short metal hook. I feel the urge to scream. The old eco-mantra of “the animal’s more afraid of you than you are of him” is patently untrue when it comes to me and snakes.

For this situation I can only blame Terry Nutkins. Alongside a young Chris Packham, Nutkins was presenting an episode of The Really Wild Show sometime at the tail end of the Eighties. As an eight-year-old, my concept of fear changed forever that afternoon when he introduced a segment on the world’s deadliest snakes. Even now, the images screened of a python devouring an entire rabbit strike a chill.

And I’m far from alone. Researchers at the University of Uppsala in Sweden concluded, through tests on 48 six-month-old babies, that showing images of spiders and snakes resulted in dilated pupils. It appears that a fear of snakes is, perhaps, innate in many of us. 

Whether you’re backpacking in Burma or sunbathing in Sydney, a dread of snakes can be a serious inhibitor to holiday plans. After all, it’s hard to concentrate on watching elephants at a waterhole in Botswana when you’re desperately wondering if the scrub you just brushed up against contains a cobra in a bad mood.

As a travel journalist who spends chunks of the year in snake-heavy environments such as southern Africa and Australia, this trepidation has been a background noise to my working life and holidays. So how can those of us who wish to vanquish our snake phobia and get on with enjoying our travels begin to tackle our fear?

For me, treatment begins with meeting the largest snake in Europe. With close to 10,000 animals and a peerless global reputation for conservation and innovation, working for Chester Zoo is, according to Iri, “like playing for Barcelona – there’s really nowhere higher to go after here.” He claims to be able to get anyone with a fear of snakes into a better psychological place within an hour. Part of his tactics, I soon discover, are tough love.

“Yep, I’ve been bitten on the face by a snake,” he tells me. “It’s a fact that you usually can’t tell what a snake is thinking. They don’t socialise and they don’t give much away. But treat them with respect and I promise that your fear will subside.”

Iri asks me simply to watch Bali, who is coiled up in the corner of the home she shares with one other python in the zoo, for a good 10 minutes – through the glass this time. Gradually, my initial feeling of terror at staring at her immense, malevolent-looking face, begins to abate. 

“Obviously you can’t touch Bali,” Iri tells me. “We don’t really go in for any of those cheesy ‘snake around the neck’ photo moments here. It’s not fair on the snakes. Plus Bali is definitely far, far too big. But just watch her sleeping. She’s not interested in you or me in the slightest.”

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And so, with Iri’s gentle rationale as a soundtrack, I’m guided around the reptile house to acclimatise myself by observing small, undulating caecilians, otherwise known as tentacle snakes, their drain pipe coloured forms wriggling gracefully under water. Then I watch an avocado-coloured red-tailed racer, indolently curled up on a branch.

“I have about eight snakes of my own at home,” Iri tells me. “The reality is that snakes are reserved and instinctive reptiles. Calmness is the key to losing fear; once you have that, then everything else follows”.

He’s right. Back in the lab with my build-up programme complete, I watch the black python’s movements for a short while as Iri seems to beguile it into a state of calm. Slowly, very slowly, I creep forward and rub my hands over its glossy skin. It’s cool, smooth and dry, and my panic diminishes as Iri, using the metal hook as a form of steering wheel, lets the snake explore both our bodies. “How do you feel now?” he asks me as the python is placed back in its tank.

“I’m never going to be mates with them,” I respond, as my heart rate begins to slow from that of a metronome on steroids to something approaching normal. “But I don’t immediately assume they’re going to slither out of hotel wardrobes to kill me anymore.” 

I left the lab, quietly confident that I’d overcome my fear. That said, I could have sworn that the python, its dark, oval skull pressed against the glass of its tank, gave me a small, but slightly contemptuous, smirk.

The Chester Zoo Reptile House full day experience with a curator starts from ￡250 per person and is for individuals and couples, not groups: 01244 380 280; chesterzoo.org