Big Snake

For a snake fan (such as myself) there are few cooler places to be than cruising down a quiet road after dark in rural Queensland, Australia. For here be snakes. Big snakes. Every now and again, if you keep your eye out, you'll see one. Sometimes you won't need to look to carefully to see one......

This is a mid-sized Amethystine Python, Morelia amethistina. Amethystines or "Scrubbies" as they are known are the largest aussie snake by a fair margin. Unconfirmed reports put one specimen at 8.6 metres, they definitely go over 5 metres. As I said: a big snake. These kind of lengths put it up there with the Green Anaconda and the 3 big Python species

This one was just keen to get away from me and never in anyway aggressive. I was interested to note what appeared to be damage just below her lip. I'm pretty sure that area has her heat sensing pits in it so hopefully that damage doesn't represent a serious injury.

When full-sized and fully fit these snakes can eat pretty much anything in Australia as these images show. As a number of aussies mentioned to me in my time there, they love to eat cats which is an excellent reason to keep any potentially invasive feral creating pets you may have in the house and not running around eating native aussie fauna.