Boa Or Python?

[Khon Baan Nok]

Yesterday morning a large snake took an adult cat right outside my bedroom window. I heard it, but to my chagrin did not see it.

My girlfriend (also to her chagrin) came upon the snake as it had the cat about 1/4 ingested. It was apparently quite an adventure, as she realized that the cat was dead and reached down to remove it from the hole in which the front part of its body was located. She found it very "heavy" and when bending down to move it, she found herself face to face with the reptile, with jaws distended and the cat's head already down the hatch. She and some neighbour ladies managed to extract the cat, with difficulty, so that they could give it a "proper" burial.

Anyway, moving beyond the issue of whether it is a good idea to get into a tug of war with a reptile large enough to eat cats, we got into a discussion of what kind of snake this would be. We looked at snake pix on the web, and the most likely candidate is the Burmese python, which I'm not able to locate in any of my dictionaries, including the excellent Domnern one.

The most common names for large constrictors seem to be:

งูเหลือม

งูหลาม

The dictionaries seem to refer to these interchangeably as boa constrictor and python.

Any idea as to what the correct name is for the python, and in particular the Burmese python? Domnern calls งูหลาม

the Indian python, while it calls งูเหลือม the reticulated python. There's no entry for the Burmese. It does not have the Latin names so I cannot tell if the Indian and the Burmese are the same creature.

If geography helps, I live right on the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok.

Tks for helping.

[Farma]

Looking around Herp sites on the net the common name for the Burmese Python is งูหลาม ngoo lăam Scientific name Python molurus bivittatus.

The Burmese Python is the largest sub species of the Indian Python - Python molurus molarus

[mangkorn]

Just curious about the name Khon Baan Nok (actually, I'd write is as "nawk") for a guy who lives smack-dab in the middle of the big metropolis?