Ok, here we are, we have snakes and we have transmitters. Now with months and weeks and days of planning all behind us it is surgery day. The penultimate day, the day when we find out which of our snakes are strong enough for the implantation of the transmitters.

So, the breakdown;

Forest Cobra number 1 – Vader
Weighed in at 1.6591 kg

Forest Cobra number 2 – Gizmo
Weighed in at 1.417 kg

Black Mamba number 1 – Chelsea
Weighed in at 2.355 kg

Black Mamba number 2 – Lucas
Weighed in at 1.690kg

All the snakes were sedated with Donald schultz tried and tested mixture. All injections were done between the scales to prevent adding scar tissue to the snakes and damaging their scales more than we needed to.

Transmitters were made by Victor Hugo and are of a similar size to those attached to bees! But ours are quite a bit bigger based upon the duration we need them to work – nearly all the size of the units is the battery.

The trickiest part of inserting the units was manipulating the aerial into the right place.

The surgery went well and with deft stitches Suzanne managed to line the scales up almost exactly to where they had been.

If it wasn’t for the blue of the stitches you wouldn’t have realised there was an incision at all!

A little sleepy afterwards the snakes will spend the evening in luxury accommodation (heated garage) and after a quick health check all that was left to do was treat them for mites/lice/ticks.

We will check up on them in the morning!