The first snake I caught this year was half an hour after midnight.
Yes, when you get a snake in Melbourne, who ya gonna call?
Snakebusters!
So some dudes called me from Toorak. It’d been a posh get togeather on New Year’s Eve when just after the fireworks I got the call from some distressed people being “attacked” by a Black Snake.
My wife, kids and myself went to the ginormous place in her car, bailing out from a friend’s new year’s eve get togeather.
We got to Toorak, drove through a security gate and saw a big Black Snake curled up next to some cars and so I picked it up and shoved it into a shopping bag.
That’s all I had to put it in!
Anyway, the good thing is that while potentially deadly, Red-bellied Black snakes just don’t bite!
That is unless you attack them with a shovel or those stupid metal “snake handling tongs”.
That’s why I just picked it up like a tame pet snake.
As Black Snakes are NOT native to Melbourne, this one was a vagrant.
Now because I’ve looked at thousands of these snakes and from all areas they come from, NSW, ACT, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, I know who’s who in the zoo and this one was from Northern Victoria or thereabouts.
Subspecies “porphyriacus”. Recall I reclassified the species a few years ago and split it three ways, all as subspecies!
Anyway, I have to either hand it in to the government or let it go in Northern Victoria, so I contacted the wildlife department for their intructions.
I have one and possibly three pregnant black snakes here all three years old and all pregnant to the brother.
In the few days since New Year’s eve, I’ve been running at from 3 to 5 calls a day to catch snakes. The usual Melbourne stuff, Browns, Tigers, Copperheads and a heap of Bluetongue Lizards.
Running out of time, I’ve taken to letting a lot of lizards go around my house so Park Orchards is now in the middle of a Bluetongue Lizard plague.
The last call out for a Bluetongue was a man standing on a table in an office in Heidelberg in a state of panic, waiting for the lizard to jump onto the table and attack him.
When I asked him why he was in such fear he said “Steve Irwin said they give a nasty bite!”
Ugh!
Got a mega-fast Tiger Snake in an art gallery in Bulleen and a few other feral Tiger Snakes in other places.
There always seems to be a spike in Tiger Snakes in mid summer and then in late Summer Copperheads seem more prevalent.
For most of my time in Melbourne, Tiger Snakes have been the most commonly caught snake by me. But in the last two years, Copperheads have been a bit of a “dark horse” with numbers rising to match the Tiger Snakes by snake season’s end.
Also I get more and more Brown Snakes each year, allowing for the variable that most are in Melbourne’s north-western suburbs.
Today I had a call from a woman with a massive python in her yard. Before I got to her house, the snake’s owner had come from nearby and recovered the snake.
She thought the snake was going to eat her!
By the way, we don’t get pythons here in Melbourne … not native anyway.
Between all the snake calls, its feeding and cleaning, a few reptile incursions and taking bookings for school reptile shows and the usual collection of Melbourne childrens reptile parties.
In the next fortnight things ramp up dramatically as people come back from holidays and more snakes have set up home in quiet “abandoned” gardens in the meantime, awaiting the return of the home owners.
We do a heap of shopping mall reptile shows later this month and then the phones go completely APE as people book Melbourne reptile displays for the rest of the year.
Just remember – be NICE to snakes … they really are OK!
All the best from
Snake Man
hi we live in country vic not far from hanging rock,more in the suburb area of romsey on a good size block we have a back adhesment running behind the very back end of the yard which is really wet this year,it is normally dryed out this time of the year,but this year with all the rains and tones of rains we are haveing the adhesment is running like a low creek all the time,we have a large chook shed with chooks,in the past 3-4 weeks i,ve noticed broken badly crushed eggs loseing nearly up to three pre day from out of normal 6 chook eggs,it started as one,well we have called two snake catches one in the aera which one hasn,t called back,and the other one won,t come unless we see snake?he said it was a lizard but we asked with that that type of badly crushed eggs,as its just terrible what the eggs looked like after-wards”we asked would a rat do this or mice or lizard he said no!”now in the past few days I,m sure i did a brown snake “brown not super brown more like a chocolate brown,beautiful looking to be honest”Very smooth skin” but” i do know a bit about snakes “leave them alone?and hopefully they will leave you alone?i would say it may not have been fully grown but about 1.5 inches round and as it was tightly around the chook egg i didn,t see its head just looked like a knot over the top the chook egg,i didn,t try to catch it or anything just put the lid back on the chooks nesting area and slowly proceeded to walk out the door of chook shed,I have looked on the google for different snakes and it really looks like the copper head snake,(brown snake)”who can we call and should we also be letting our local cancil know?since it is their adhesment that should be covered over,because i think with all our rains and maybe continued rains the cancil should be doing something about this?And or they just don,t?” and we have to get a snake catcher in willing to help catch this snake?”As my uncle taught me a bit about snakes that they also have babies,we would like to see this snake caught before end of summer,when they really start to breed and i would like all my chook eggs back? who do you call?,as no snake catchers seem to be willing to come out?”thanks from Tom.