Fangless job dealing with life’s slippery characters
THE footage begins in the cab of Tony and Brooke Harrison’s Nissan SUV which, for reasons that soon become clear, has been fitted with the personalised plates ‘5NAKE’.
“We got this urgent call – don’t know what it is, but it’s in a bedroom,” Tony says.
Brooke quips, out of frame: “There’s usually eastern browns here.”
Tony: “I’ve seen red bellies. You can do this one.” Brooke: “Righto.”
Her movements over the next 12 minutes are fairly unremarkable, but it’s still pretty tense.
A nervous Pimpama family – and 90,000 Facebook followers – watch as Brooke methodically disassembles a child’s room, looking for something that shouldn’t be there.
She goes through toys, clothes, blankets and a doll house when, suddenly, she zips out of frame.
“Ah! There you are.” She reappears, holding a little noodle of a thing.
It’s a good result – a tree snake – one of the nonvenomous varieties that frequent Queensland’s south-east corner. “He was in the bookshelf,” Brooke tells viewers. “Maybe he likes to read.”
‘How cool is this’
The video uploaded to the Harrison Snake Catchers page is not really an adrenaline surge, or even as confronting of some of the pair’s other posts, like the time Tony found a carpet python that died after trying to eat a possum.
But it‘s clear from the comments that Brooke’s tree snake footage is a hit.
Inadvertently, the popularity of such videos is also likely why an increasing number of people in Queensland are taking up snake wrangling themselves.
A rudimentary search of social media reveals dozens of snake-catching operators in Queensland, ranging from one-man wranglers running a side hustle to professionally branded outfits staffed by multiple catchers in matching uniforms.
The Harrisons are one of the more prominent businesses operating around the Gold Coast, Brisbane and Sunshine Coast regions who offer snake removal services for a fee.
Tony says the videos he makes with Brooke have been a great way for people to learn about reptiles, but they also triggered a growing number of people to realise it is possible to catch snakes for a living.
“They say ‘how cool is this?’ But they’re only seeing the glamorous side,” Tony says. “If anyone watches our page today they see that I’ve caught nine snakes and they sit there and think ‘well he’s charging $110 a call, that’s more than $900 a day’.
“But then they don’t realise I have had calls to 3am, for the third day in a row.”
If you go back 30 years, snake catching was probably more of a hobby for most, and usually done for free. Tony, for example, says he started as his neighbourhood’s “go-to snake guy”.
The gradual professionalisation of the field – hastened by various insurance and small business overheads – means snake catching is now treated as a genuine trade that requires training and certification.
While the Queensland Department of Environment and Science is responsible for issuing the Damage Mitigation Permits needed to catch and relocate certain animals, the type of animal covered under the permit is not separated among the data.
This means that despite an apparent surge in snake catcher numbers over recent years, it‘s actually quite hard to say how many there are in the state, as they are mixed in with those who relocate animals such as turkeys and possums.
‘Top Gun stuff’
It might be hard to quantify the exact level of demand for snake catchers in South East Queensland but some – like Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers owner Stuart Mackenzie – says a booming population and surge in building activity will continue to drive a great need.
“People building houses just can’t keep up with demand, so the snakes unfortunately can‘t keep up either,” he says.
“They’ve got no choice but to go into people‘s yards.”
Stuart is one of the stars of the National Geographic reality program Aussie Snake Wranglers that aired back over spring, and features in various Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers videos.
Stuart says the gradual increase in the snake catcher community has been good for competition, but it could also be a hazard considering how simple it is for someone to get a licence.
It merely requires a first-aid certificate, recommendations from fellow snake handlers, or completion of an equivalent snake-handling course, as well as any other business and insurance requirements if you want to make money off it.
Stuart on the other hand had a zoology degree and several years under his belt working with reptiles at Australia Zoo before he started snake catching on the side, eventually going fulltime about three years ago.
Tony has been in the snake catching business more than three decades.
While he is supportive of those who have a passion for snakes – and encourages those who are committed enough to take it seriously – he remains sceptical of the modern pathways to qualification.
“Mother Nature says that Australia has a shitload of snakes,” he says.
“And thank goodness because in the old days, the only good snake was a dead snake and they got killed most of the time unnecessarily. And when humans are in the public trying to do that, that‘s when they get bitten.
“I hope ... authorities change the legislation about how they let people become snake catchers … so that some bloke who‘s on his second carton of piss can’t get this brain waving and hey, let’s become a snake catcher.”
‘There are a couple of cartons in that one alone’
Tony, who has also authored a book called Snake Catcher: True Stories and Reptile Facts, says no two days in the job are the same.
Sometimes, his work involves wrangling customers as well as the animals.
“I can sit here for hours and talk to you about jobs … sexrelated, drug-related …
“And then the next subject is what we call vegetarian jobs. The people are not vegetarians, but they are definitely off their chops.
“You can get a call out to someone on really bad drugs and it’s just them staring at their thongs saying ‘get the snake away from me! get the snake away from me!’
“There are a couple of cartons worth of stories in that alone.”
Tony says many people mistakenly think the job is as simple as picking up a snake and putting it in a bag.
“You’ve got to listen to what the customer says on the phone. Look at the weather. Listen to the suburb. What the snake has been doing. You need to be able to read the personality of a snake so when you approach it, you know what you‘re in for. Whether she’s sitting on eggs.”
Both Tony and Stuart say October through to March is usually the busiest period for snake catchers as the animals come out to sun themselves.
Among the non-venomous varieties in South East Queensland are carpet pythons, common tree snakes, and keelback snakes.
The venomous varieties include whip snakes, eastern brown snakes, red-bellied black snakes, and brown tree snakes.
One of Stuart’s more memorable recent jobs was crawling under a house at Kureelpa in search of a giant brown snake: “I obviously couldn’t stand up under there and there was only one way in and one way out. It was there sitting up like three feet off the ground. It was over six foot ... He just sort of sat there and just didn‘t want to move. I was trapped under there for a while because he was blocking my way out.”
Stuart said he can get upwards of 30 phone calls in a day and charges $120 for a callout (“plus an extra $10 or $20 if it’s a particularly tricky job”).
However, he has a word of warning for anyone thinking of getting involved in the industry. “It is not this nine to five, you don’t have your dinner and just forget about it,” he says.
Tony says: “You go out with the missus, as soon as you order your dinner: ‘ring ring sorry, can we cancel that order?’ You actually lose your life believe it or not, you have to be married to the job if you want it to work.”
Funny he says that. Tony and Brooke have been together for nine years and often share snake catching duties with weekend snake-handling shows over the cooler months.
“It’s very hard to survive on snake-catching alone,” Tony says. “And you cannot survive on snake shows alone.”
‘The public have got it, they’ve learned’
Tony says people are now more conscious of snakes, and keen to learn more.
“When I first started with Facebook people would say ‘hey, I‘ve got a snake in my backyard’ and it was 200 comments about killing it and burning the house down.
“Now It’ll be 50 comments, 48 of them positive … saying leave it alone, (this species) does this and this. I don’t have to say shit now, the public have got it, they’ve learned.”