Malhar shares its ground with more kinds of snake than most residents ever notice, most of them shy and wanting nothing to do with us, all of them older residents of this land than we are. When one turns up in a garden or a stairwell, the first call here isn't to chase it away. It's to a neighbour who comes out, gently, and moves it on.
This page is not a warning. It's a record: of what lives here, what to do if you meet one, and how this community has learned to share the ground with them.
Know what to do if you see oneA dozen snakes from the Common Snakes identification project, common to this part of Bangalore and the ones most likely to turn up at Malhar, kept plainly rather than dramatically. Most are non-venomous. A few deserve real caution. None are villains.
The twelve snakes residents are most likely to run into, drawn from Shifting Radius's Common Snakes identification project. Knowing them on sight is most of what keeps an encounter calm.
The Malhar protocol. Six steps, the same every time, whether it's a wolf snake on the stairs or a cobra in the garden.
Most snakes want to leave undetected, not to fight. Give it room and it usually takes it.
No poking, no throwing things, no trying to catch or kill it yourself. Cornering is what causes bites.
Which block and roughly what it looks like is enough. Exact house numbers aren't necessary.
The Goodearth Snake Helpline (WhatsApp) reaches a trained rescuer directly, day or night.
Keep pets and children back, and a torch on the spot if it's after dark, until the rescuer arrives.
Safely, away from homes, unharmed.
Anti-venom, given at a hospital, is the only treatment that works. Call the helpline on the way, they can advise en route, but don't wait to see if symptoms appear before leaving.
The myth-versus-fact essentials, if you only read one section on this page.
A snake in the garden is not an emergency. It's a neighbour that hasn't learned to knock.— the Goodearth Snake Helpline
It didn't start as a calling. By his own account, it began with curiosity around 2020, a first snake handled bare-handed the following year, and by 2023 the hook, tongs, and training of a serious volunteer. What keeps Sandeep going, four years and hundreds of rescues later, is less an appetite for adventure and more a conviction: that every life, and Malhar's biodiversity, is worth the calls that come at 2am. Every rescue since 2022 is written up, one at a time, in his own words.
A WhatsApp group connecting Malhar residents directly to trained rescuers. Report a sighting, ask a question about something you saw, or just watch how the record grows.
Run by a small team of trained neighbours.
A cobra behind a car, a python in the compost, the tailorbird-versus-rat-snake day. Contributed and live from shiftingradius.com and nanusense.com.
A rat snake working branch to branch toward two tailorbird chicks, the parents throwing themselves at it. This time, the parents won.
A reflection on 175 rescues over two years, and on what the work asks of the person doing it.
A weekend at a snake-science workshop, learning biology and conservation from working herpetologists.
The 222nd recorded rescue landed on International Snakebite Awareness Day, and was the first Rock Python logged here.