Slow Slithering...

(Lemon Jellie, this post is for you!)

So, some of you may know that our house is a mecca for creepy wildlife. There’s something about backing onto a creek that brings out the beasties, and among the hundreds of bearded dragons, giant spiders, and a myriad of birds, bats and lizards, are many, many snakes in all different varieties that I’ll often find in really unexpected places (and usually in places I need to be).

I have to admit, when we first moved in here, I was absolutely petrified. I already had a paralysing fear of spiders, and would regularly find them on the inside of the shower screen, the toilet seat, on a random towel or behind pots and pans, and once on a cardigan that I pulled out from my wardrobe. There was much shrieking and a whole lot of obsessive checking of things; but thankfully, as the years have passed, I seem to be coping much better with their surprise visits.

Just recently, we had a mad month of snakes at our house. We’d find carpet pythons, metres long, exploring the front verandah, slithering over the kids bikes, curling around our outdoor furniture. Snakes that sunned themselves in the backyard, mated in our side garden, used trees as ladders, and sneaked from one end of the house to the other through the guttering. Night after night, they’d mate in our roof cavity, sliding over beams, the rough sound echoing through the sleeping house. And there were plenty of nights that we sat up, at two in the morning, drinking tea or eating ice-cream because the noise of them was just too loud.

And then, nothing.

Not a trace of them around the house; no persistent scraping noises in the roof, no shrieking of local birds who followed and alerted us of the snakes when they were migrating in the garden. And weeks go by in blissful silence.

But this morning, look what I found:

Last year, we found baby pythons under the couch, or suddenly in the hallway, or writhing on the bathroom floor. The kids, ever fascinated, would sit on their haunches and watch as we tried to shepherd them into boxes or bowls, to be released near the creek.

Finding the first skin this morning was a cue to be a little more vigilant around the house – hopefully there won’t be too many of them wriggling into our lives this season!

Do you have interesting wildlife at your house?

Or got a snake story?

Nat