The jungle at night is my favourite place on the planet. The weird and wonderful come to life just as humans are typically going to sleep. Strolling through a pitch-black rainforest is exhilarating and invigorating. The noise from all around envelopes you. Your senses are heightened, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You feel vulnerable – truly a visitor, at the mercy of the jungle.

As you shine your torch beam into the darkness, hundreds of tiny lights shine back at you. Each is the reflective spot on top of a spider. There’s bioluminescent mushrooms, frogs with horns, agricultural ants, and wide-eyed monkeys who only appear after dark. None of it quite seems real.

And then there’s this guy. Just chillin’, hangin’, bleppin’. Doing his snake things.

Say buenas noches to the Amazon Tree Boa. He’s one of the less fearsome snakes in the jungles of the Amazon. He can’t paralyse you like a Coral Snake, or melt your flesh like a Fer-de-Lance (those are only mild exaggerations), but he’s still a pretty amazing creature.

While the Amazon Tree Boa is practically harmless to humans, the situation is a little different if you’re a bird. Many birds perch in the understory or lower canopy at night in order to catch a few Zs. Often, they look like adorable little puff-balls – or, from the perspective of the Amazon Tree Boa, delicious little puff-balls.

Tree Boas hunt at night, and when they happen across a sleeping bird, they brutally wake it up with their teeth, and then immediately begin strangling it to death. Once they succeed, they will slowly and delicately swallow the bird whole.

Night-time in the jungle is definitely exhilarating – but I never said it was pretty.

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Amazon Tree Boa (Corallus hortulana), Los Amigos Biological Station, Madre de Dios, Peru