Slither down the spine
Sanctuary has deadly snake rise
A FAR North wildlife sanctuary is contending with an outbreak of one of the world’s deadliest snakes.
But the habitat caretakers are treating the slithering guests just as they would any endangered animal.
For the past three months, Piccaninny Plains Australian Wildlife Conservancy managers Sally Gray and Graham Woods have been dealing with an influx of death adders attheir homestead.
The couple live on and manage the 165,000 hectare property on the Cape, which hosts many animal species, including 17 threatened species.
Ms Gray said they would normally see these types of snakes less than once a year, but they had started to become more common around April.
“Since around May we’ve been getting one or two a week, usually turning up in the early evening when we’ve got our backs turned,” she said.
“It’s interesting because the death adders are generally in decline across Australia due to habitat loss and fire impacts.”
Ms Gray said that, despite death adders being generally non-aggressive snakes, they weren’t to be taken lightly — they were highly venomous, had the longest fangs of any snake in Australia and the fastest strike of any snake in the world.
“They’re sedentary snakes, so we bag them up and relocate them, which is easier to do than with other more aggressive species like taipans,” she said. “We don’t know exactly why they’re coming into our space, but we treat them like we would any animal, even if they’re not as cute and cuddly.
“We still have to be careful because a bite can be considered fatal.”
Most of the death adders on the property were caught lying in the open, but one was found under a Royal Flying Doctor Service medical kit.
“One of our tracking dogs can find snakes pretty well and she let us know,” Ms Gray said.
“It means that come dark, or any time of the day, you have to be conscious of where you’re putting your feet.”
She said the influx might be a result of increased rodent activity at the homestead. “One idea we had is during the couple of years where there was a lot of native rats and mice around the homestead, it caused them to breed up, and now we’re seeing the result,” she said. “Death adders take 30 months to mature which roughly lines up with when we had a lot of rodents around, but all we can do is speculate.”