No fire in his (red) belly!

I met my second snake of the season this morning, while doing my morning bike ride. He was there on the road looking very fierce. He was a red-bellied black snake, tenth on the list of  Australia's deadliest snakes, according to Australian Geographic. We make out that's the same as tenth deadliest in the world. Not so. Anyway, it's pretty venomous.

Mind you, they don't often chase you, or bite you. Especially when they're dead! This one had in fact been hit by a car, and he was quite lifeless.

I respectfully picked him up from the road, and put him on the footpath, so he could scare pedestrians all day! Must have worked, because when I went back this evening to photograph him, he was still in exactly the same spot. I think they'd all given him a wide berth. In fact by then his smell was considerably worse than his bite.

My first snake of the season: an endangered Broad-headed one!

I really like snakes. Don't see nearly enough of them, despite being out in the bush so often. So far this snake season (the warmer half of the year) they've just about eluded me.

But last week, on a rocky outcrop above Victoria Brook just outside Mount Victoria in the Blue Mountains, there it was: the first of the season. And it wasn't a common old brown snake, a red-bellied blacksnake, or a diamond python. It was the rare and endangered broad-headed snake (Hoplocephalus bungaroides). My second ever such sighting, and both out in the western Blue Mountains area.

They used to be common throughout the Sydney Basin, though they were always endemic to the region. Now they are only found in some of these remoter areas. Click here for: Wikipedia article

It seemed oblivious to us for a while, but eventually it woke up when we started pointing our cameras at it. It reared up, looked threatening for a moment, and then slithered into a hole under a rock.

It is indeed rather venomous, I gather. I always forget to be frightened though.


(Photo credit below: Angela McArthur)

FNQ loves its snakes

Didn't get to see one, unfortunately. The locals are of course very proud of them.

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.

Surviving the museum

 'Surviving Australia' is the name of one of the galleries at Sydney's Australian Museum. It's packed with scary venomous spiders and snakes, things like sharks and crocodiles that eat you, stingers, biters and buzzy things, all the things the tourists love. And so do we!

It's been 20 years or so since I'd last explored the place, and it's come on quite nicely. There's still the classic galleries with the the fine collections of stuffed birds, insects, marsupials etc. There are skeletons galore, and of course dinosaurs. Menacing, noisy dinosaurs. Australian ones too these days. There are rocks, gemstones and meteorites.

A lot of work has gone into making things very accessible and exciting for kids and for tourists.  

There's also a classy gallery on indigenous Australia, and intelligent displays on environmental degradation and extinctions.

I think an Australian Museum visit is a must for visitors with a few hours to spare and a wish to gain a good quick introduction to the country, and it should probably be on the agenda for all of us locals too now and again.