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ABC Wednesday is hosted by Mrs. Denise Nesbitt
This is a fish trap used in Borneo. Essentially it is made of two cones. A shorter cone with spikes at the tip is woven into the longer cone, which has a door at the end.
The trap is usually made from rattan, a type of vine that grows in the jungle. The trap is placed in a canal or creek. When fish swims inside, it is unable to swim out, as the spikes prevents it from swimming back from where it came in.
When I was a teen ager, we lived in a house with a creek/drain behind our house. The area was proned to serious flooding. During the heavy monsoon rain, the drain which was about 10 feet across would be swollen with the running water. Grand Dad got some traps from the natives and gave them to us. Dad used to put a couple of these fish traps which we called fish dogs, to catch fish.
We didn't catch much fish, in fact, we hardly caught any. But we did catch a lot of water snakes. Yes, you read it right, we got snakes as thick as 2 inches in diameter and as long a two meters. You may not believe it, I was a very brave girl, I wasn't afraid of the snakes. You grab hold of the head, and it can't do anything.
I must have my Amazon Hakka Mum and Grand Ma's blood in me. I grabbed the snake and chased and terrified my two older sisters who screamed and screamed. After all the fun, I helped Mum chop up the snakes into inch long segments and fed it to our egg laying hens.
I learned my biology of snakes, throughout their entire length of their thin body, snakes have thumb sized eggs. I said, "imagine if all these eggs hatched into baby snakes, there will be a zillion snakes which will come and steal our chicks."
This stopped when our hens had watery shit and Mum said the hens must be having a stomachache. Dad stopped trying to trap fish. I stopped terrorising my sisters. To this date, Rose and Elizabeth are still afraid of snakes.
When I saw this trap during my trip back to Borneo, I knew I had to snap it's photos. When my sisters who now live in Borneo, they probably will scream again when they read this post.
http://annkschin.blogspot.com/2008/12/snakes-in-oz.html This post was penned by Rose' son. You can tell she passed her fear of snakes to him.
5 comments:
hi Ann,indeed you got amazon's spirit - very brave.did you people make soup out of those pythons that came near your house then? i don't know how snake meat tasted like.
I like the net but not snakes. Never! I have nightmares involving snakes and have since a small child. I do admire you for not being afraid of them!
how wonderful to see a handmade basket that is a tool. I love baskets.
Take care!
We didn't eat those water snakes which were too small. But in my Dad's home, we ate almost everything. My grand dad had a saying, except for the dining table, anything which has 4 legs are edible. Also if the back faces the sky, God made those creatures for man to eat.
I am not adventurous any more in exotic food. The water engineer isn't keen.
Snakes scare me too, unless those in the zoo , behind the enclosure! lol
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