Sunshine Coast and Noosa snake catchers reveal craziest catches of the season
Sunshine Coast and Noosa snake wranglers have revealed their wildest catches this season so far, and you won’t believe where they’ve found our slithering friends. Watch the video.
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Sunshine Coast and Noosa snake catchers have revealed their craziest catches in what has been the busiest season in recent memory.
After claiming Queensland was set for a horror snake season, with the hottest winter on record keeping normally dormant snakes active and looking for shelter, local snake catchers have been kept busy with a high number of call outs.
Early in the season when it was dry brown snakes were quite prominent and on the move, while lately red-bellied black snakes have been thriving underneath the cloud cover.
Snakes have been sighted in unusual locations including on top of a toilet roll at Doonan as well as coiled around a traffic light at a busy Maroochydore intersection.
Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers 24/7 general manager Dan Rumsey said the favourable weather conditions have made for an incredibly busy season.
“The favourable weather conditions has meant there’s been a lot of snake activity,” Rumsey said.
“We’re seeing snakes in really healthy numbers and a lot of the snakes we have been catching have been incredibly healthy specimens too, which is really good to see.
“We definitely have a few calls coming in, we’re doing well over 20 call outs a day.”
Rumsey added that there have been plenty of memorable catches over the past few months.
“There’s been a few, one of the most exciting was a large red belly going through the legs of Stu (Stuart McKenzie) down a driveway,” he recollected.
“We’ve had some brown snakes turn up in some pretty crazy places, I caught a brown snake out of a dishwasher at Currimundi, as well as caught a brown snake out a chair that a gentleman was sitting on.
“We’ve seen snakes hanging from trees with possums they’ve killed and trying to eat, we’ve seen it all this year.”
Luke Huntley of Snake Catcher Noosa recorded the catch of his life, when he pulled a red-belly black snake from a $400k Ferrari California at Noosa Waters.
“That was awesome,” Huntley said.
“The customer called me up and said we’ve got a snake here, it’s inside our car, I get to the house and I see this beautiful Ferrari.
“I was really careful, but I got my favourite snake out of one of my favourite cars.
“The customers said next time they get a snake, they’re going to take me for a drive in it.”
Huntley added that another memorable catch this season was using a Christmas stocking to bag a snake on Christmas Day.
“I went to a friend’s house on Christmas Eve, thinking I was going to be driving home, but I ended up having quite a few beers,” he said.
“I woke up on Christmas Day and my dad gave me a lift to his place for Christmas and said if there was a call out, he would take me to it.
“I received a call out, I didn’t have any of my gear on me, so my mum gave me a Christmas stocking to store the snake in.
“So I ended up catching a carpet python with a Christmas stocking, that was really funny.”
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