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.