A Flora and Fauna Guide to Lebanon Needed

What’s lacking? A guide to Lebanon’s flora and fauna, I was thinking, as I saw this snake in the riverbed of the Walnut River (Nahr el Jaouz) in Northern Lebanon. I’m sure they have guides in Arabic, and maybe even French, but this illiterate Dutch would like one in English please. The - still dry - riverbed of the Walnut River The snake looks like a gigantic python on the picture, or something of the likes, but in reality it was a puny little snake of 40 centimeters in length at best. Hanging on a branch, basking in the sun around a garbage bag (how appropriate). So here we (SIL and I) stand with four little kids (well, one a very fierce and incredibly bored teenager), trying to teach them to appreciate nature.
It hissed quite fiercely (the snake), so what do you do? Grab it? Not grab it? Is it going to bite?

“What is it anyway, mom?”
“It’s a snake.”
“Yeah, I know THAT! What kind of snake?”
“Well, a snake kind of snake.”

We let it be in the end, but I would like to know what kind of snake it was. So, what’s lacking? A guide to Lebanon’s flora and fauna. Anyone up for the job?

The weekend was spent hiking in a – still dry – canyon of the Walnut River in Northern Lebanon, near the village of Kaftoun. Although I’ve been roaming around the Kaftoun area a number of times now, I haven’t been in Kaftoun itself yet, but it must be quite a place, because they even have their own web site (‘I have a web site, so I exist’). I picked this little piece of information from their site; “The houses of Kaftoun number seventy, and its inhabitants number about three hundred. They are mostly Greek Orthodox Christians, who are peaceful, respectful of others, and generally well educated.” I like the ‘generally well educated’. Define educated for me.

It has been raining a bit, and where the riverbed was encased in limestone, there was water, but everywhere else it had seeped away.
There was a lot of mud, which was greatly appreciated by kids and dogs. 'I am getting old,' I remember thinking, because all I could worry about was the upholstery of my new car. 'All that mud? How am I going to get that off them? Nobody gets into my car, they'll all have to sit in the trunk.'

SIL and I are planning to build a Frank Lloyd Wright type of villa right over the riverbed, and we were exploring a good site for our project, that will probably never materialize, but it is always good to dream. We better be fast, because it looks like this is becoming a protective area (which is a very wise decision). The good thing is that you see absolutely nobody. (We're staking our claim) Totally stuck Lebanese hill top villages as the sun is setting on them.