Snakes: I dare you to fall in love

Forget Halloween Hollywood’s snake-pit scenes of writhing serpents! Forget their murderous intent in the Anaconda franchise! This Halloween I dare you to really answer the serpent’s call and fall in love with snakes. After all, you’re about to see them everywhere.

Jack Hinde with his copperhead snake Roger

Published 1st October 2024 By Selena Hanet-Hutchins
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Key times for snake sighting are spring, summer and early autumn so you may just be lucky enough to have one visit your property and get the opportunity to observe these amazing creatures. Children, especially, can benefit from ‘watching and seeing’ with snakes – at a safe distance – says snake removalist Gareth Park, so they grow up with a healthy respect, rather than fear for them: the fear is handed down through the generations but it doesn’t have to be. (ABC News Online, 2024)

Snake expert Professor Rick Shine, of Macquarie University, says, ‘If you take snakes out of the Australian ecosystems it’s not Australia anymore, they’re just as distinctive as our koalas and kangaroos.’ Not only that but, without them, their prey species could reach problematic numbers. Professor Shine has seen a shift in the general public’s attitude towards snakes since his childhood, when his passion for reptiles began, and believes it’s probably nature documentaries focused on snakes and other reptiles that’s helped change attitudes. (ABC News Online) A little education goes a long way.

Valley resident and snake-keeper Jack Hinde is keen to educate people about snakes, because he wants to keep more of them alive – a proactive and committed effort on his part: he lives with 15, which isn’t many for him. A snake-keeper since he was a Mittagong boy of 12, he has had dozens at once, only one python when he and wife Beck Comber got together, and as many as 50 when their kids were small — which meant a lot of time in the snake room. (Comber jokes this may’ve been deliberate.) As the driving force behind the Kangaroo Valley Environment Group (KVEG) project to save the endangered broadheaded snake, Hinde is breeding more. From February to April, he’s hoping to hear the slither of tiny snakes.

‘The maximum litter I’ve had was 12 and the minimum was two. But that’s that one species. Tiger snakes have fifty-odd, if they’re healthy,’ says Hinde. That must be some birth experience for the mother because, unlike some snakes, tigers give birth to live young. But not all of those fifty will survive. ‘A baby Tiger snake’s the bottom of the food chain. Kookaburras, magpies, all the birds, predatory birds, all the slightly bigger snakes, all the lizards [eat them],’ Hinde says.

As we talk, it slowly dawns on me that snakes are prey animals. Their reputation in the collective consciousness as menacing, aggressive predators out to bite us creates fear and reactive, aggressive behaviour…in us. Snakes are truly trying to stay out of our way.

‘Snakes spend most of their time hiding. The radio tracking on brown snakes suggest they spend about 80% of their time undergound in crevices and cracks and ratholes.’ Like human creatures who are reclusive loners, it’s easy to see why they might get in a panic when forced to interact with others.

We are the predators, killing them ourselves or our cats, dogs, and habitat destruction doing the job. Removal can prove fatal too. Hinde warns to only call a catcher if a snake is in the house or car and won’t leave. If it’s just on the property or around the house, leave it alone. Observe it – learn.

‘People that remove snakes for a living are probably killing the snake. [Radio tracking] studies have shown that if you take a snake from its territory and put it in another territory […] it’s almost 100% lethal for the animal. So a person who hits a snake with a shovel is probably ethically better than the person who pays the snake-catcher to come and move it.’ And both moving and killing them are illegal.

‘Unless they’re someone who understands the science and sneaks the snake back in somewhere close, which some of them do, they’re killing the snake.’

Even if they take it only a kilometre down the road, that snake’s going to die. ‘They’re highly territorial animals, and highly strung animals.’

Hinde explains that snakes have a home range within which are ‘a number of botlholes they’ll know about – logs, rocks, holes in the ground, nooks, crannies, under bits of tin. They love human leftovers lying around.

‘They love being around sources of food, so if you’ve got a pond, you’ve got frogs – you’ve got snakes; if you’ve got a nice sunny lawn, you’ve got skinks – you’ve got snakes. Most of the skink-eating snakes are nocturnal, that’s why people don’t see them.’

Lots of opportunity for spotting then. When we do see a snake, what should we do?

‘Admire it,’ says Hinde. ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s not going to chase you. Snakes don’t chase people. Anyone who says they were chased by a snake is mistaken or making up stories, it’s as simple as that.’

Snakes to enjoy getting to know, here in the Valley, include one of those skink-eaters: the whip snake, like the golden crown often mistaken for a brown. Hinde says we do have a lot of brown-coloured snakes in the Valley, although it’s not really the type of country browns like, except out round the tip: drier, white gum treed areas. You will see the diamond python and the red bellied black snake, which will rarely bite but headbutt you first to warn you off. ‘They’re real gentlemen.’

When Hinde talks about snakes he often uses phrases like ‘beautiful animal’, ‘magnificent’, ‘impressive little beastie’. His love for them is obvious, as is the joy he gets from getting to know them at close quarters. You need a license to keep snakes, and since 1997 it’s a long process if you want to keep venomous ones, but they’re great low-maintenance pets, he says, although our nearest vet that deals with snakes is Wollongong. ‘Most snake-keepers do their own veterinary work. Nicks, cuts, worming them, all that sort of stuff.’ He had an inland taipan that had a prolapse once. ‘I had to put the prolapse back in and put a stitch in. I put a sock over its head so it couldn’t bite me – a sock held on with a rubberband, because no vet is going to touch an inland taipan. It’s not something you get out and wave around.’

The rest of us don’t need to be that committed but if we spent a little time to ‘watch and see’ we might enjoy at least a taste of Hinde’s passion for nature and her beautiful creatures. Identifying and counting all those brown coloured snakes could make an excellent Valley citizen science project, too.

 

5 facts to help you love snakes

  1. Snakes smell with their tongue, which can tell left from right
  2. The ultimate intermittent fasters, snakes can shrink their stomach between meals to conserve energy
  3. Garter snakes recently passed Psychology’s self-recognition test
  4. Snakes survive and thrive thanks to an ‘evolutionary big bang’ 125 million years ago. They are a ‘macroevolutionary singularity’ (Scientific American Online, Feb 2024)
  5. Snake venom is in many life-saving drugs such as the CSIRO/Q-Sera pro-coagulant RAPclot and scientists are looking at Sumatran cobra venom for a cancer treatment.

 

Selena Hanet-Hutchins

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