A common liana snake en situ, Peruvian Amazon.
We had looked for years with no success for a common liana snake, Siphlophis cervinus, on the Amazonian (Peru) preserves that Patti and I regularly visited. We looked high and low, in trailside trees, in shrubs, and of course on lianas but to no avail. After all, this was known to be an arboreal, nocturnal, species so we scoured and rescoured leafed branches, bare branches. bromeliad cups, you name it. If it saw above ground level and reachable by us, we looked. So where did we find our first liana snake? It was crawling busily along atop fallen wet leaves in mid-trail a fair distance from any arboreal highways on Madre Selva Biological Preserve. About 20” long the slender snake was even prettier than it pix had led us to believe. Its busy pattern, a mosaic of yellow shades on black, orange highlights on black, and black reticulations on and orange vertebral line, was nothing short of spectacular.

But this first found terrestrial example has proven to be the exception. Although we still don’t consider this species common, since the first find we have averaged one Liana snake per trip. On one trip we were lucky enough to find 2.

But when compared to the dozens of calico snakes and rainbow boas we have happened across, the common liana snake has still proven far from a common find.