Nitin Shenoy is a techie by necessity, snake rescuer by choice

Programming and rescuing snakes can co-exist, after all. Ask Nitin Shenoy, 22, software developer, who is also a licensed rescuer of stranded snakes.

Nitin Shenoy may come across as that typical software professional. He works with Wipro. But he also handles reptiles with care, snakes especially.

“I live with two identities,” he says.
His fascination with snakes has relatives worried. “My mother is rather scared, she urges me to stop it,” he says, sheepishly. For the last three years, Shenoy has been working with the  Wildlife Rescue Cell of Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike.

“I grew up watching Animal Planet. I caught my first snake when I was in Class III,” he says.

It was a friend and fellow snake enthusiast, Sanjeev, who introduced him to the work. The team of 35 volunteers in the BBMP’s Wildlife Rescue Cell work under the leadership of R Sharath Babu. “Sanjeev and Sharath Sir have been mentors,” he says.

So how does Shenoy make time from his work for the snakes? “It’s not as if the snakes keep a weekend date with me, I take calls after I finish work, even if it’s at 2am,” he says. Although Shenoy’s work life is full of software, he says the wildlife is what he pours his passion into.

“More than how one handles a snake, for me, it’s about how one understands a snake,” Shenoy says. If he gets a call to rescue a snake while he is still at work, he just passes the call to another volunteer in the team.

“It makes all the difference to have someone who knows what he is doing. A licenced rescuer will take the snake to safety and release it where it is safe,” he said.

And is there something he’d like to tell DNA’s readers? He’s all for disabusing the general reader of myths about snakes: They don’t drink milk, they cannot digest calcium.

“If a snake drinks milk, it could die of stomach disorder,” he says. Snakes rescued from the city are taken to areas away from human habitation in Kanakapura, Talaghattapura and Turehalli before being released.

Has Shenoy kept count of the number of snakes he’s handled so far? “About 400, so far,” he says, nonchalantly. “Indian spectacled cobras, Russell’s vipers and rat snakes,” Shenoy says, are the most common.

“Every rescue call means a new experience. Some snakes have their wits about them even in unfamiliar surroundings, some can be quite numb,” he says.

And has Shenoy ever been bitten? “Just once, by a non-poisonous rat snake, in the face; not a bite to forget easily,” he says, glowing as if it were a love-bite.

“While rescuing, it’s just the snake and me,” says Shenoy, adding that if a call is received in peak time traffic, response could take about an hour. Whoever calls is requested to keep the snake away from a crowd, and observe it carefully so it does not get out of sight.