Saturday 12 November 2016

Easy guide to Tasmanian snakes


It's easy because they're all venomous, so you don't have to waste time deciding whether they're harmless or not. Just step back a bit, grab your camera, and click away!

Most people have evolved a very healthy phobia about snakes, but I don't seem to have that. Just a desire to photograph them!

On this trip I saw two of the three species. On Mt Wellington I encountered a white-lipped snake (which I'm sure we always used to called the whip snake). Not that venomous. But then on a walk in the Wielangta forest, my walking companion suddenly jumped backwards onto me, and there was one of the big ones, holding its ground in the middle of the track, and looking every bit as deadly as we knew it to be.

It was either a tiger or a copperhead. They're not that easy to distinguish, as they each have a range of possible colour schemes. I thought copperhead, as its head looked fairly small. It did have tiger-like bands ofcolour though. I've since shown the picture to several alleged snake experts, and there have been votes for each.

If you do get bitten, the antivenom the Tasmanian hospitals give you covers all three snakes.


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