Snake Catchers Adelaide: Warm weather sees our legless friends emerge from their winter homes
JUST like us, the snakes have been waiting for the warm weather. If you do happen to find one in your backyard the advice is simple: don’t try to catch it and call the experts.
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ROLLY Burrell has caught hundreds, perhaps thousands, of snakes in his 37 years in the game.
On 30 of those occasions the snakes have had the last laugh, managing to sink their fangs into the knockabout 57-year-old’s body and inject their powerful venom.
On three or four of those 30-odd occasions it looked likely that Rolly could actually become a casualty of the job he loves so much.
“Yeah, I’ve been in intensive care a few times in my younger days,” he says matter of factly.
“I’ve had the family all sitting around thinking you’re going to the big maker.
“It probably doesn’t sound very professional when you say that you’ve been bitten around 30 times, but when you catch as many snakes as we do and you’re getting into bird aviaries and drainpipes and that type of thing then it’s going to happen sometimes. Most of the bites were from eastern brown snakes.”
The eastern brown may not have an impressive name when compared to, say, the king cobra, black mamba or death adder, but that doesn’t stop it from being the second-most venomous land snake on earth after the inland taipan.
It’s also the snake South Australians are most likely to find in their backyards. Red-bellied black snakes, whip snakes, pygmy copperheads and tiger snakes generally round out the list.
That’s where Rolly and his team from Snake Catchers Adelaide come into play. Rolly heads a group of five catchers who fang around the greater Adelaide area waiting the phone calls from homeowners with unwanted guests, and at this time of year those calls come thick and fast.
“Because of the weather we’ve had, the snakes are a month or so late this year,” Rolly says.
“Just like us they’ve been waiting for the sunshine and now they’re obviously really hungry or horny or whatever. They’re beginning to move. There were four moving around a backyard in Clarendon yesterday.”
The backyard Rolly is speaking of was a somewhat overgrown patch of land with a swimming pool, a perfect environment for the four eastern browns who were frolicking in the sunshine last Wednesday.
One of them was the biggest brown snake Rolly has come across in his almost four decades as a catcher.
Rolly’s fascination with all things creepy crawly began, like most of the members of his team, when he was a youngster.
“All my life while people were playing football or whatever I was looking for animals,” he recalls.
“I can’t help myself — if I pull over for a wee I have to peel a piece of bark off and see what’s living underneath it. I’ve always had that fascination for animals. I was one of those young lads who’d bring home a snake in his lunchbox and get told off.”
For his offsider, 44-year-old Ange Broadstock, becoming a snake catcher was more something she fell into, although now she loves the job.
“I’ve been doing it for eight or nine years now,” the former Tasmanian says.
“I actually used to be a makeup artist. I’d had a couple of kids and was at home for a few years and knew I didn’t want to go back to that job.
“I had a look in the paper and the first job I saw was as a wildlife driver for Rolly. He trained me up — I think it was the first day that he had me pinning a snake in a backyard. It went from there, and I’m actually better than him now.”
Rolly scoffs at the assertion, then admits “that’s probably true, actually”.
“When we’re out on a job she pushes me out the way and grabs the snakes herself.”
Ange has only felt the fang once in her career, a non-life-threatening bite to her finger sustained one afternoon while she was transporting a snake to her car.
“You can feel it — you get a sense that you’re gonna go,” Ange says.
“He flung up — it was a really warm day and he was on fire — and he flung up and bit me on the finger. I didn’t think even think he’d got me, but then Rolly squeezed my finger and blood came out, so we knew that I’d been bitten.”
If there was one message that Rolly and Ange would like to get across to homeowners it would be to never attempt to catch or kill a snake on their property.
“Ninety nine point nine per cent of people who end up in hospital are trying to kill them,” Rolly says.
“If anyone had tried to kill that big one yesterday it could have got them right up on the chest or shoulder, which would have been very bad for them.”
Rolly says that while people’s attitudes towards snakes are slowly changing, and that the chop-them-up-with-a-shovel mentality was dying out, there were still some people out there who still believe that the only good snake is a dead snake.
“They’re actually really intelligent animals,” he says.
“I’ve gone under a building and a snake has gone to go into his hole, looked at me, then shot back the other way so he didn’t show me where he lived. He actually turned around and looked at me.
“They don’t want to hurt us, it’s us that wants to hurt them.
“If we can understand a little bit more how they work, then we’ll learn that they’re not out to get us.
“They just want to live their own life, mind their own business, eat some rats and mice and go on their merry way. We need to start changing and we really need to start looking after stuff better.”
As well as changing people’s attitude towards snakes, Rolly and Ange are passionate about clearing up the myths that have persevered over time.
They say that one of the biggest misconceptions is the belief that any backyard with a blue-tongue lizard living in it will be snake free. Unfortunately for lizard lovers, it’s not even remotely true.
“Juvenile snakes eat a lot of skinks,” Rolly says. “Then they start to grow and eventually the skinks don’t give them enough energy and they move on to rats and mice.
“Then when they’re a bit older they see a blue-tongue and it brings back childhood memories – it’s like a nice piece of chocolate for them.
“I’m not saying that blue-tongues attract snakes, that’s not the case, but if they come across one then they’ll eat it.
“Sometimes you’ll even see a brown snake living with a bluetongue for a while, but eventually they’ll knock ‘em off.”
What about the other myths? Surely putting ropes around your yard will stop them? Doesn’t bother ’em a bit according to the snake catchers. Electronic snake repellents? A complete waste of money they say.
Rolly and Ange say that snakes can be found across the whole Adelaide area — they’ve even collected a red-bellied black snake from a car park in Hindley St — but that the majority of their calls came from the foothills region.
“Flagstaff Hill, Blackwood, Morphett Vale — we’re in those areas every day,” Ange says.
“You have a drainage system running down to the Patawolonga,” Rolly continues.
“A snake can pop into a drain anywhere and pop out wherever he likes. Down on the flats, we get a few every year, then it starts to build as you move further out.”
Every snake caught by the company is released at a safe location.
And despite his decades of experience, there is one snake that Rolly can do nothing about. It’s the call he hates attending more than any other – the dreaded hallucinatory snake.
“Yeah, you always get the druggies that see things,” he laughs. “For some reason they always seem to see snakes.
“It’s a pain in the arse — they’re sitting there and they’ll say, ‘there it is, it just moved!’ And you’ll say, ‘mate, that’s the extension cord for your fridge’.
“They won’t let you out of the house so you have to ring the police because obviously you can’t push them around to get out.
“That’d happen three or four times a year. I just wish they’d see elephants or monkeys instead of snakes, then they’d have to call someone else.”
Visit www.snakecatchersadelaide.com.au or call 0413 511 440