Morbid Fascination

I’m still harping on about the snakes here. Call it morbid fascination.
Maybe it is because a friend piqued my curiosity with the following photos. Apparently, it is very rare to get photos like these, but my friend managed to witness not one but TWO such occasions! Great that she managed to capture it on film. At a guess, these snakes would have been about 4m long.



They show two different types of snakes, on 2 different occasions, engaged in either the mating dance or fighting….I gather, both involve a lot of snakey-type swaying and wriggling around, with not a lot of helpful reptilian commentary. However, I am told, it was beautiful to watch. I dunno. It makes me squeamish just looking at these pics.

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The said friend, also tells of her dismay in finding a 6m python in her home last year. She had been wondering where her cat had disappeared to, and had walked into her house to discover a large python curled up in her son’s toybox. The python must have followed the ‘possibility of a tasty morsel’ in through the cat door…. When ‘dinner’ decided not to cooperate, the python made himself comfy, and didn’t want to be moved, thank you.
The local Snake Man’s call out fee was exorbitant, and so my friend decided to take action into her own hands. Wielding a cobweb broom (the longest implement she could find!), she prodded the snake to try and encourage it into moving out of the box. Apparently, if snakes could look mildly amused, this one did.
After much fruitless prodding (and comforted by the knowledge that pythons are not venomous though they can inflict a nasty bite), my friend decided that the snake needed a bit more forceful persuasion to move out. She bravely lifted the coils out of the box (they are apparently very heavy!), at which the snake decided that it really wasn’t going to be left in peace here. It slowly made its way out the dining room, through the kitchen, and out the open door.
The cat was discovered hiding at the neighbours’ place, and needed quite some coaxing to come home…..it now has a distinct phobia of anything that looks vaguely long and dangly, like computer cables, wires, etc….

But the story doesn’t end there. Our friend (who really doesn’t live out in the boondocks!) has just discovered The Most Enormous Snake living in the rafters over her back door. She told us that she was most perturbed to come home the other day to discover a huge snake dangling its head over her doorway, curiously watching her….given that the size of the head is about the size of a small sandwich plate, she is guessing that the body will be definitely larger than the 6m version that came through her home last year! UGH‼‼
Exactly how big this snake is, nobody has been able to ascertain yet. Its body has remained curled up in the rafters and nobody has been brave enough to venture up to have a look! Interestingly enough, the visible part of the snake is so large and solid, that the cats have been fooled into thinking that it really isn’t ‘long and dangly’, and seem to be quite unafraid of its presence above them. Perhaps they will remain safe-ish whilst winter is here, and the snake is conserving its energy. However, I’m betting that the snake is watching from above with more than just a passing interest in the cats….call it morbid fascination.