Pythons on your porch? Call the ‘Snake Princess’

Civil serpent: Shwe Lei with a Burmese python at the monastery in Yangon. — AFP

AT four in the morning outside a Yangon monastery, Shwe Lei and her team were wrestling 30 writhing pythons into rice sacks and loading them into a van.

It was just another day in the life of Myanmar’s premier snake removal squad, prising pythons and cajoling cobras from dangerous entanglements with the human world before returning them to their natural habitat.