A Visit with the Thousand Oaks Cobra at the San Diego Zoo Last Weekend

It was nearly one year ago that Thousand Oaks made headlines for a venomous white monocled cobra caught slithering around local neighborhoods over Labor Day weekend.

After a massive snakehunt, the unusual looking leucistic (mostly white, but not albino) snake was found and brought to the Los Angeles Zoo.

Subsequently the snake was transported to the San Diego Zoo, one of only two zoo facilities in the U.S. with proper anti-venom for the species.

This lovely female Monocellate Cobra was subsequently named Adhira ("lightning") and appears to be doing quite well at her permanent home in the Reptile House at the San Diego Zoo.

We stopped by to visit Adhira last weekend. While admiring her, we bragged to other onlookers that she came from our city, Thousand Oaks. They gave us this, yeah, uh huh, sure, look. "Do you live in Southeast Asia?" to which I replied, "Seriously! This cobra was found in Thousand Oaks and has its own social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook!" They had moved on to the next snake.

Good thing they found Adhira as she would not do well in the Thousand Oaks sunlight!