Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Holy Snakes!

Lora and I saw our first snake in the field. Well kind of.

Lora ran into one of her plots real quick and I decided to stay with the air conditioner... I mean car. As I sat there I looked out into the forest past a downed tree from last year's cyclone Larry. The tree looked a little weird at first. You know how when you see something that is different than you've experienced in the past it takes a few seconds for your brain to process the new info. Well this is what happened to me and this snake. It was too big and long to be a snake... hey I've heard that before. Sorry trying to keep it PG-13. Anyways, take at look at this thing.

This is just the first half of it. It turned out to be a 13-15ft python with a very full belly. About 6ft down it had a huge hump were it was busy digesting dinner. Dinner was about the size of a oppossum or large bird. I of course radioed to Lora to calmly tell her to find another way out of the forest and to quickly come and see this monster. She of course thought I was exaggerating and that it was probably not more than a 4ft long snake.

Neither of us have every seen such a large snake in the wild. It was truly an amazing thing to see. I was glad it had eaten recently and that it looked to comfortable basking in the sun to chase me down and eat me. I think that if I had seen this monster while walking in the forest I would have quit my volunteer job as a research assistant... no matter how gorgeous my boss is.

As far as the leech count goes I stopped counting after 2 more days of leeches in the 50 to 60 range. I'm not sure where Lora is at with her leech count but I know she started to catch up with me the following days.

I have one more picture to show before signing off. It's of a Kokaburra bird, one of Oz's national tresures. Many songs have been sung about it including the Laugh Kokaburra song. Maybe you know it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

holy crap sticks!!! that's the biggest thing i've ever seen! ok, ok, actually that's the 2nd biggest thing i've ever seen. i am married to matt, remember.

happy new year, kids!

love, kate.

Anonymous said...

uh huh- nice one McKill-yuh. :)

Glad to hear you guys are surviving in Aussie land. Thanks for the posts, really enjoy them...

Cheers,
Adam

Anonymous said...

You clearly have some loyal readers here.

That snake would have scared the pants off of me--slightly more so than the leeches. Do leeches transmit STD's?