Snake soup in cooking varies from place to place but water snake and python snake are popular choices. Chinese cobra, Banded krait, Indo-Chinese Rat Snake, Tri-rope beauty snake and Hundred-pace viper are commonly used in snake soups. At many restaurants that serve snake soups, customers are able to choose, according to their preference, live snakes to be prepared. Snake meat is light pink in color. On a par with fish, snake meat tastes much richer and is chewier than the former. Ramy Inocencio of CNN describes that "Minced dark mushrooms, finely julienned chicken, fragrant chopped ginger and other herbs and spices fill
Western banded snake eagle also other small vertebrates, ambushing from a perch. They drop from the perch to trunk, foliage or ground. They are solitary birds, and very secretive. Due to their sedentary lifestyle, they are often detected only by their calls. The western banded snake eagle sometimes rises to soar, while it calls above the canon. They utter a loud, high-pitched 'kok-kok-kok-kok-kok'. They are found in Africa in the northern tropics from Senegal and Gambia east through to Ethiopia and then south to southern Angola and Zimbabwe, mostly west of the Rift Valley, but are mostly absent from the western lowland equatorial forests.