Benalla snake catcher Jeff Davies’s love of reptiles grew into a career
Reactions to snakes for most people sit somewhere on a scale between nervousness to outright terror. But not for Benalla’s Jeff Davies — despite a scary run in just before Christmas.
BENALLA snake catcher Jeff Davies will remember the call-out he received last spring for a long time.
A mother and daughter had been driving up the Hume Freeway, on their way to Wangaratta to do some Christmas shopping.
“Suddenly a snake popped its head up from under the bonnet of the car,” Jeff says.
Despite the fright while driving going 110km/h, the pair pulled up, then got out of the car to wait. When Jeff arrived, he started searching the vehicle for what he had been told was a baby snake.
Jeff was on his hands and knees, checking behind the passenger front wheel arch, when he suddenly found himself face-to-face with an eastern brown snake.
Jeff waited for the snake to start to emerge on its own before pouncing on the 1.5m hitchhiker.
It was safely released later.
“What they didn’t show me until afterwards was the photo they took while they were driving up the road because if I had seen that I would’ve known it wasn’t a baby — it was going to be a fair-sized snake,” Jeff laughs.
Reactions to snakes for most people sit somewhere on a scale between nervousness and outright terror.
But stories such as these are just part of a day’s work for Jeff, whose lifelong love of reptiles started when he was seven years old, when his dad uncovered a blue-tongued lizard hiding in their backyard in NSW.
As a teenager Jeff would take the train to Gosford to learn what he could from Australian Reptile Park founder Eric Worrell, while his “long-suffering parents” would regularly take him to La Perouse Snake Show (which bills itself as the longest continuous running reptile show in the world) so Jeff could “find out more about handling snakes and proper care of reptiles”.
Fifty years later, Jeff turned his passion into a career.
Jeff, who turns 60 in July, is a licensed wildlife controller and snake catcher. Before moving to the North East Victorian town about three years ago, he was working in retail on the Mornington Peninsula and says snake catching was a “hobby” carried out for friends and neighbours.
Then he reconnected with his high school sweetheart, who was living in Benalla — they would eventually get engaged after 40 years apart. So that was how Jeff started thinking about not only taking his hobby north, but expanding it into a business, North East Wildlife Control.
“It was an option I had spoken about before I moved, and did a fair bit of research and found out whether there was an interest in the community for that service and whether there was a need for it and it was a resounding yes.”
He expanded from just snake catching after he was contacted by a local business that needed a wildlife controller on their books as a contractor. Jeff says he is not only licensed to deal with all indigenous reptiles, but also sulphur-crested cockatoos, corellas, galahs and brushtail possums, making his job less seasonable than just warmer months.
That’s not to say snakes do not pop up outside summer — just on Saturday, Jeff posted a photo of a tiger snake he had recently been asked to identify. A sunny day was enough to bring it out of hiding.
In the year to the end of March — when Jeff is required to report to DELWP his record log for the previous 12 months — he says he had about 80 callouts for snakes. Just less than half were for eastern brown snakes, and the same again for red-bellied black snakes. A tiny portion were tiger snakes. All three are venomous.
For a call-out within 50km of Benalla, he charges $100 to catch snakes and release them safely elsewhere (he doesn’t charge if the snake is in a public place). The cost is higher if the job is further away, and if the snake cannot be found there is a $50 call-out fee.
Jeff says in the past 18 months he has noticed a change in attitude towards snakes, including by farmers. Where once they might have dealt with an unwelcome visitor with a shovel or shotgun, now they will call upon his services, he says.
But that’s not the only thing that’s changed. He says snake catchers along the east coast of Australia have noticed more bigger snakes being caught.
He said the phenomenon is caused by the drought. “These snakes have got to be the size they are — and what I’m talking about is for instance 2m red-bellied black snake or 2m eastern brown snake — because for years they have stayed out of harm’s way — harm meaning human.
“Now they are coming out and coming closer to humans looking for water and looking for food. And that’s what we have found in the last season — the number of cracking big snakes has been amazing.”
Although snakes form a big part of his work, Jeff is still fond of blue-tongued lizards, the creature that started it all for him. He currently has one in care — a juvenile that was attacked by a cat.
And he is clearly thrilled to be in his dream job.
“I would say to anybody if you have a passion for something, don’t let people sway you,” he said.
“This is probably the reason why it has taken me so long is I have had a lot of people say ‘It’s a dead end job’, ‘It won’t work’, ‘You wouldn’t be able to sustain it’, and all this sort of thing, but with the right approach, yes, you can.”
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