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 I have studied reptile ecology in the field, camped and bushwalked extensively in the Australian bush, but I have never seen a density and diversity of snakes anywhere to compare with where I now live, near Byron Bay. On my community, Gondwana, we have at least three highly venomous species, the Eastern Brown Snake, the Bandy Bandy and the Red-bellied Black Snake, with the Roughscaled Snake being a possible fourth. There are two kinds of treesnakes, the Green Tree Snake and the Brown Tree Snake, and at least three species of small, non-dangerous ground snakes. But the ones I love most are the Carpet Snakes. These intricately-patterned pythons hang out in our laundries, cruise in and out of our roofs, dangle off the rafters in couples making love, shed their skins in our candleabras and even curl up in our portable barbeques. They sometimes get run over by cars while slowly sliding their 4 metre bodies across warm roads, or get chopped up in heavy duty lawnmowers. Apart from such accidents, they are very suitable co-inhabitants for humans. They are non-venomous (although they sometimes get cranky and bite deeply), patient (mostly), quite used to people moving around near them, and they eat the rats and mice. I share my garden with at least 6 carpet pythons with overlapping territories and the inside of my house with two young ones. The markings on the Carpet Snakes are very characteristic, and apart from an overall similarity in pattern, every one is different. Many of them have letters written in the stripes, spots and curved figures on their backs, and so it is easy to name them and come to know them individually. The first one I met on Gondwana shortly after moving in was a very big one, 4 metres long, crossing the driveway. I just happened to have my camera with fast film and a telephoto lens, and captured her in close up, complete with beautiful rainbow iridescence on her head. That is her above: Rainbow Serpent. |
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 A few months later I moved into a little cabin with a very dense, wild garden. My partner called me out to one of my sheds and there, curled up under a sheet of cardboard in an excavation in the ground was a mother Carpet Snake sitting on her round, white eggs. She was so tightly coiled about them that the eggs could hardly be seen. Her nest was lined with chewed-up bits of plastic and paper, and was partly underground surrounded by a mound of the fine gravel of the shed floor. I am puzzled as to whether she made the nest herself; I cannot picture the mouth of a python being able to shred and arrange pieces of plastic or excavate gravel. So that remains a mystery. I began visiting her every day, at first sitting quietly at a distance, but getting closer as she became accustomed to my presence. Eventually I was able to sit beside her while she sat on her eggs or sunbaked on her fern patch just outside the shed. It was then I noticed her name, Ilva, written in her spots on her 1.8 metre back. |
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 Our local snakeman says that very few baby pythons survive in the wild: they get eaten by cane toads, killed by parasites, and even eaten by their mothers at hatching (the mothers sit on the eggs for about 4 months and get pretty hungry!). I decided to feed the mother so she wouldn't eat her hatchlings, and checked the eggs every day. Bruce found a rat's nest in his underwear drawer and the mother escaped so I fed the 5 baby rats to Ilva. She accepted them all hungrily. It occurred to me to check the temperature of the eggs in case some circumstance should arise whereby I would have to incubate them myself. Eventually Ilva allowed me to put a thermometer in between her and the eggs and I found that they ranged from about 25 to 35 degrees. |
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Each day Ilva came out to explore the house, have a drink and climb a gum tree branch which I leaned from the floor to the top of my built-in wardrobe. I put it there because apparently the babies will climb high as soon as they come out of the eggs, presumably to try to get away from predators and hungry mothers. Ilva became accustomed to the funny smells and vibrations in the house and to me walking around near her. One day when I was working on my computer she came climbing up the leg of my chair and slid off between my feet. Next day Bruce was recording a song he had recently written to promote the local snakeman over the radio: "There's A Snake In The Kitchen". Just then Ilva entered the kitchen and cruised past as if on cue. My flash happened to be charged and here are Bruce and Ilva in that moment of synchronicity. |
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 My main concern with having Ilva in the house was her need to sunbathe; the sun does not shine directly into any of my rooms. When I was convinced she knew her way around the house and could unerringly return to her eggs after every trip, I let her go outside. While she was out I had to stay within view of the open front door to make sure no venomous snakes came in, which made it hard to keep my eye on her too. Understanding the limits of reptile intelligence, and their strong guidance by smell and habit, I was concerned that she might become confused and lose track of where her eggs were. She disappeared in the grass. I went to find her, suspecting the garden shed, and sure enough, there she was poking about anxiously in her old, wet nest site. I went and sat beside her to see what she would do. Smelling me seemed to trigger the memory of the eggs being moved into the house and she would leave the shed in that direction. But the familiar track beside the shed would then trigger the memory of the eggs being in the shed and back she would come. Back and forth, back and forth, she had little chance of resolving her dilemma. I brought the big box with the eggs in it out of my house and set it up on wooden blocks above the old nest site, out of the mud. Ilva circumnavigated the box once, then, all memories now reconciled, slid into the box and curled up on her eggs. All was back to normal; I visited her every day while she sunbaked and took the warmth back to her eggs. One day Bruce and I almost stepped on a huge, gleaming Red-bellied Black near my front steps. I had no film! Tragic! He was a beautiful snake with ebony back and bright crimson belly, and stayed still smelling us with his tongue. We backed away and he left. Next day I got some film, put on tall leather boots and long pants and went on a big hunt through the garden to find him. He was nowhere to be seen, so I gave up, took off my clothes and boots and sunbaked myself. I wandered over to Ilva's shed to see how she was going, and found her just emerging, cold and sleepy, from her nest. I sat down and she cruised past me into her sunny patch on the ferns. Just then who should come slinking over the ferns from the opposite direction but Red-belly, tongue flicking on the hunt and evidently after Ilva's eggs. What should I do to warn her without making things worse? He was warm, alert and aware of Ilva but she was cold and sleepy and could not detect him. Before I could decide, he struck her in the neck and pulled back tensely. I was in agony, thinking she had been bitten and would die. She struck back at him and he took off into the ferns. She remained where she was with her neck tensed in an S-bend. Then Red-belly came sneaking back from a new direction, once again headed for the eggs. Now there I was, completely naked, trapped in between a highly venomous snake and his intended lunch of python eggs, which I was prepared to defend. I climbed onto a bench so I could get my voice up over the shed roof and the bushes and yell for Bruce to throw me my boots. Meanwhile I found some old bottles and rocks on the floor and started lobbing them in front of Red-belly's face to deter him. He took some convincing, but finally shot off. Then Bruce called out that he was also naked and would be crazy to wade through the deep grass to the shed with a dangerous snake on the loose, when his mobile went off with an emergency call from the Snakeman. Someone had a brown snake in their house, so off went Bruce in his sarong and I was left with Red-belly. Back he came a third time for Ilva's eggs, and this time I swiped the grass and hit the ground in front of his face until he accepted defeat and left. I ran to Ilva. She was sluggish and her head wobbled from side to side. She did not respond when I tapped the stick on the ground in front of her, except to slowly drop her head down to the ground next to my foot. I was afraid she would die. I rang a veterinarian and he confirmed that the venom would be fatal to a Carpet Snake. In tears, I sat beside her while she crawled slowly back to her nest and curled up on her eggs. Perhaps I would have to become a step-mother after all. I checked on her repeatedly for the rest of the day, but she did not die. I learned that Red-bellied Blacks often strike with closed mouth and do not envenomate, so he must have simply hit Ilva to warn her away. Lucky! Hearing from the Snakeman that hatchling pythons go up as quick as they can, I placed branches up all around Ilva's nest box so the little ones could escape. I was determined not to miss the event. I also set up a terrarium for breeding mice and tiny lizards, so I could feed the baby pythons when they came. One day Ilva shed her skin and looked very beautiful. Next morning was cold and I went out early to find her gone and the eggs empty. I did not expect them to hatch on a cold night, and I had missed it all! Not a sign of baby pythons was to be seen, and I hoped that they got away safely. |
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 A few weeks later I was given a mysterious, heavy bag. Inside was a lovely young Carpet Snake, a female about 1 metre long, with two mice bulging in her belly. She had been evicted from her home in a laundry by someone who was terrified of snakes and would not tolerate her presence. Knowing there was already quite a crowd of large pythons living all around me, and suspecting that snakes dislocated from their territories suffer stress and will probably die, I offered her my house as her territory. She accepted. She had a pattern on her head that looked just like Yoda's face, but I called her Lace for her complex, pretty markings. She chose to spend her first night as my guest draped atop my bedroom mirror. After that she used the gum branch I'd set up (for Ilva) as her ladder to and from the top of my wardrobe, where she nestled during the day in a roll of material. She came out each night for a drink and went exploring. |