KEY POINTS:
A severed snake head found by three children playing in a suburban Napier street last night has been rushed to a herpetologist for identification.
Norwich Crescent resident John Lawrence, said he got "a bit of a fright" when his daughter, Nicole, 8, brought home the snake head. "You don't expect the kids to bring home a snake," he said.
"It was fresh. Obviously it's been someone's pet. It looked like a baby cobra".
The head was a blue-grey colour on top and whitish under neath, and the widest part of its head was 6cm. He estimated the jaws opened wide enough to hold a ping-pong ball.
Nicole said she and her two brothers TeHaenga, 6, and Tyshan, 4, were playing outside in the suburb of Tamatea when they found the snake head in a gutter.
Tyshan picked it up, and put it on the grass, and TeHaenga stepped on it.
"My brother put his shoe in the mouth and pulled a fang out," she said.
Mr Lawrence said the head was a bit worse for wear: "The boys thought it was a great joke to put their shoes on and try to squash it," he said.
All imports of snakes are illegal, and specimens found in cargo and containers are often sent to be identified by MAF herpetologist Davor Bejakovich, who has said about 19 per cent of the reptiles and amphibians accidentally imported to New Zealand are snakes.
But Mr Lawrence said he thought it might have been a cobra which had been smuggled into the country. He said that if the discovery was a fresh specimen of a cobra-like species, it raised the question of whether there were other young being raised in the neighbourhood.
An inter-agency wildlife enforcement group two years ago began investigating reports that a snake smuggling ring was selling breeding pairs in New Zealand for up to $10,000.
The agency -- made up of Customs, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and Department of Conservation officials -- was told of a developing black market in New Zealand for snakes, which were being sold at between $5000 and $10,000 a pair.
The team leader for the wildlife enforcement group, Customs official Colin Hitchcock, of Auckland, said at the time that people keeping snakes in their homes "were not likely to publicise the fact".
A MAF biosecurity spokesman, Phil Barclay, said it could take some time to identify exactly what the specimen was and where it had come from.
But he said it did not appear to have come from a live reptile.
Mr Barclay said a reptile expert had initially seen photos of the snake's head, and was now examining it.
"From his initial look, he thinks it would not have died in the striking pose ," Mr Barclay said.
"The mouth's open and all of that; snakes generally don't do that apparently."
He said the snake's head appeared to have been posed and preserved.
"Apparently it has all the hallmarks of something used in southeast Asian remedies."
MAF had not yet ruled out the possibility the snake was actually a toy, Mr Barclay said.
Other experts have said it can be difficult to identify some species of snakes without being able to sight the patterns of scales on the body. One possibility was the snake had been brought into the country preserved in a jar of fluid, such as alcohol.
Mr Barclay urged anyone with more information on where the other part of the snake might be, or where it had come from, to contact MAF on its pest hotline, 0800 809966.
In the unlikely event that members of the public find a snake, they should not approach it.
Building contractors found a snake at Onehunga in 2004, dead, but still soft, among scaffolding which arrived on a ship from Papua New Guinea.
A live snake was caught and killed in a Mt Maunganui florist shop in late 2002 and three snakes, both dead and alive, were found at New Zealand ports in as many weeks in April 2001.
A massive snake hunt in 2000 in Auckland's Freeman's Bay turned out to be a hoax.
- NZPA
