A slithering dilemma

Tasmanian tiger snake. Photo: Adam Holbrook

I saw a snake in my veggie patch yesterday. It was sunning itself next to the lettuces and sugarsnap peas.

I’d just finished watering the tomatoes in the greenhouse, and as I turned out the door, I saw a flash of black as the snake turned back on itself, and darted for the patch of weedy fat hen.

I made a noise of course; I don’t think I’ve ever responded to a snake encounter silently. It wasn’t a squeal or a scream, more of a “Waaaaah!” in various notes. Cyril had his nose in the grass near where the snake was headed, but looked more concerned about the sound from my mouth.

The first snake of the season makes your heart beat the fastest. Dane’s been tripping over them for weeks now, but Guy and I have had a slow start to the season.

There’s been one hanging around the tool shed, which is next to the washing line. One day he was stretched out straight across the doorway when Dane went looking for some pipe fittings. Another time he wriggled across the walkway and behind the compost. He scared Andrea the bookkeeper so much she believed he was in her car and had to stop part-way home and empty the contents with a hook-handled umbrella.

My mum can’t sleep with striped sheets. Back in the 1970s when Dad owned a wildlife park, he used to have a program on Tasmanian tv for kids. He’d take his snakes into the studio and let them slide around the polished floor, frightening the cameramen. Then he’d take them home to Granton in hessian sacks, get distracted and forget to unpack the car, and Mum would discover them under the seats when she left for the work the next day.

When I was growing up, long after the wildlife park, Dad would get stirred-up with people in our district who would go looking for snakes to kill. The general rule at our farm was that we’d leave the snakes alone unless we, or the dogs, were at risk. A toddler playing with a snake in the backyard was one of Mum’s big fears.

I can remember clearly the prolonged twitching of the first snake I saw killed. I can’t remember how Dad dispatched it – probably the mattock – but the image of it lying next to the rubbish bin flicking back and forth stuck.

Guy’s mum Denise ruined many wooden-handled garden tools protecting her family of five from snakes at the backdoor at Yolla. You’ll notice she now has steel handles.

The family dog Sasha was a great watchdog for snakes: she had a unique bark when she discovered one, but never touched them. Dane lost his beloved Jack Russell, Rusty, a few years ago. He came home to find a dead dog and two dead snakes on the lawn. And then Denise lost Jaffa, another Jack Russell, last season.

The fence at Guy’s Grandma’s place was speckled with holes, made with the shotgun as she blew the snakes off the lawn. She kept shooting them till she finally had to leave the farm in her 80s. There aren’t so many snakes in town, but I bet she shuts the screen door with the same care.

Since we’ve been at Mount Gnomon we’ve had two sows die from snakebite, both of them from rare genetic lines. When we found the first one frothing at the mouth and stumbling across the paddock we thought she’d contracted some sort of exotic disease. We shooed her out of the herd paddock to be quarantined and she collapsed in the laneway. She was struggling to breathe and her mouth and tongue was dark purple.

She died as the vet pulled into the driveway, and then we realised she’d been killed by a snake. The vet confirmed it.

The second one had piglets on her, and the symptoms appeared less severe. She was standing in the paddock puffing, her mouth a bit dry and bloody. The following day she was lying down, and her breathing had worsened. Because she hadn’t died quickly, I was hoping the poison was working its way through her system and she was going to fight it out. But she died, and it took hours, and it was horrible.

Occasionally cattle and horses will die from snakebite, but I think the problem with pigs is their curiosity. They’ve always got their noses to the ground, turning things over and investigating.

So we have a dilemma. We choose to live next to the bush, so we have to accept that sometimes snakes will visit our territory, just as we go exploring in theirs.

It would be impossible to call the snake remover after an encounter. We wouldn’t be able to keep track of the snake, and they’d be searching all over the yard.

It’s illegal to kill them; they’re a threatened species. But it’s a horrific death for an animal that gets bitten. And we worry about Cyril, and friends’ children, and the people who work for us.

So yesterday I put the sprinkler on the veggie patch and hoped the snake wasn’t into cold showers.

But I reckon as soon as he saw me he was gone: through the chicken wire, across the lane, and into the silage stack. Or perhaps he went across the driveway, through the orchard, over the road, and back to the bush. Let’s hope so.