Schoolyard egg hunt or lethal snake shakeup?
Kids may have found cache of unhatched killers
When the first child dug the first egg out of the sand, the possibilities were endless and not all of them were terrifying.
Maybe a fluffy little chick was inside? That would be cute. Not likely, though — the egg was very small, as were the next 11 that children unearthed that day late last month from the sandpit outside St. Joseph’s Primary School in Laurieton, Australia, on the east coast north of Sydney.
When volunteers from a wildlife conservation group arrived at the school, they decided the eggs — 43 by the time they’d finished digging — looked decidedly reptilian. The volunteers at first thought they might be water dragons, pretty lizards that are sometimes kept as pets and look like they’re smiling.
But when wildlife volunteer Rod Miller shone a light through one of the eggs, the Guardian wrote, he saw no bird or lizard, but a striped baby snake.
Then Miller’s group, Fawna, did a bit more investigating, and announced these 43 eggs contained the deadliest snakes in Australia.
Eastern brown snakes don’t smile. They can grow more than two metres long and are one of the most poisonous species in the world. They have killed about two dozen Australians since 2000.
And now Fawna was informing the parents of St. Joseph’s that in another two weeks or so, dozens of brown snakes would have swarmed out of the sand pit.
The volunteers took the eggs and reburied them in some nearby bushes. (Fawna is a wildlife conservation group, after all.)
But soon skepticism crept in. Bryan Fry, a biologist at the University of Queensland who had at first told the Guardian the eggs were “definitely” of snakes, began to reconsider.
“I reckon they are indeed water dragon eggs,” he said later, noting that lizards have legs to bury with, and snakes do not.
But Miller, the Fawna rescuer who first responded to the sandpit, pushed back. With his own eyes, he said, had seen inside an egg what looked like “a small pink worm with a couple of eyes which I can only think was a snake as it had no limbs.”
Meanwhile, a volunteer returned to the reburial site on Tuesday to inspect the eggs. Whatever they were, they had already hatched.