New season, new site and guess who for snakes!

G'day! It's been far too long since I've posted, but seeing as the weather in slowly trying to warm, and the calls are also starting to roll in I figured it was time for an update!

Yesterday we launched our new website, something that has been in the making for a month or so. I've gotta say I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! Take a look at it here and let me know what you think.

Had a memorable call out last week to a house in Runcorn. It was for a Red bellied black snake on the footpath outside the house. I raced to the address in anticipation of finding the first venomous snake for the season, but on arrival the snake didn't look too good. The street was dimly lit, so I used my car headlights to allow me to take a better look. It was definitely black, with a red belly, but it looked kind of rubbery.

The rubber Snake

I walked towards the snake rather puzzled, but I soon realised the reason why exactly it looked rubbery, it was because it was in fact a rubber snake! But hey, at least I got to keep the rubbery bugger, and he costs much less to keep that my other more lifelike snakes.

The day after the above call out I received a call from a lady in Greenbank who had a snake crawling up their security door. Now whenever I get a call I always ask a few questions, just to get an idea of what I'll be dealing with before I arrive.

The first question, what does it look like?
Colour is a notoriously poor way to identify a snake, but it can narrow it down. For instance, if the snake has a strong pattern with blacks, browns, yellows or creams, you can be quite confident that around Brisbane it will be a Carpet python. With the varying colours of other snakes found in the region, this is one of the few snakes I would be confident of Identifying from colouring alone.

Another question is where is the snake? For instance if the snake is on the beams of your pergola eating a frog, then it's unlikely to be the mostly ground dwelling Eastern Brown Snake. One other piece of information that can help is what suburb you are in. After spending some time relocating snakes, you start to become aware of some suburbs that tend to get their fare share of certain species of snake.
An example would be in Parkinson, south of Brisbane where I've had a lot of calls for Keelbacks. Chapel Hill, Bardon and most other leafy suburbs surrounding Mt Coot-tha are Carpet Python central.
It's kind of like playing the old board game guess who, narrowing down the suspects till you have the right species.

So after asking the lady from Greenbank the usual questions, I drove out there with the expectation of seeing a Common tree snake climbing her security, boy was I surprised to find a nice big Red bellied black snake hanging from the top of the the door. Of course what made this even more exciting was that this one was not rubber!

Red Bellied Black Snake from Greenbank