No, I’m not morphing into David Attenborough. Weever fish a few days ago and now a snake. It’s just that I hear or read words and, if they grab my attention, I post them.
My mother-in-law was born in Epirus in a tiny village near the Albanian border. When we go there in the summer, we have to watch out for scorpions in the house. This year has been scorpion-free but so far two snakes have been spotted, one inside the house. The first was the common adder or viper (οχιά) and the second was a Balkan whip snake.
Some things never seem to change. Years ago, I read Edward Lear’s Travels of a Landscape Artist in Greece and Albania. Lear was in Albania and Epirus in the late 1840s, and many of the things he bemoaned are still a feature of life in Epirus today, two being wild dogs and scorpions.
Unlike the οχιά, the δεντρογαλιά is not poisonous. Babiniotis describes it as φίδι χωρίς δηλητήριο, που αναρριχάται στα δέντρα, and offers this etymology: δένδρο + γαλή <<γάτα>>. Liddell & Scott say that the γαλή was any of a number of animals resembling a stoat. Here is a video of a slightly injured δεντρογαλιά: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxxxGw9QylA
Wikipedia offers this: The Balkan whip snake is a diurnal, ground-dwelling species though it does sometimes clamber through low vegetation. It is fast and agile and feeds on lizards, large insects such as grasshoppers, nestling birds, and small mammals. Females lay clutches of four to ten oval eggs measuring about 30 by 17 mm (1.2 by 0.7 in). It hibernates in winter in such places as rock fissures, animal burrows or outbuildings and sometimes several snakes will share a hibernating site.
And, finally, why is my mother-in-law’s village experiencing more ophidian visitors this summer? The simple answer is that some joker thought it was a good idea to kill most of the village cats.