After a three-day tour followed by a full-day wildlife workshop and then the opening of our WIldlife Information Centre at the end of September, I felt the need to sleep in just a little. Soon after dawn however the Lewin’s honeyeaters started making a commotion just outside the house, and Denis (husband) was over the other side of the courtyard preparing a cuppa, so I stumbled out in dressing gown to find out what was happening. Nothing was visible in the tree apart from the agitated birds, who seemed to be scolding something on the roof. The ladder was still in place from gutter-cleaning, so I climbed it to find myself face-to-face with a large carpet python with several fat ticks on his face. We had seen him a few days before, and I had rung the 1300 ANIMAL number to find out whether ticks could be harmful to a snake, but no one on duty at the time knew, and the number they gave me led only to an answering service. I hope it was the right number – queries from a stranger about ticks on snake faces might seem a bit odd to some – but in any case I never received a return call. So here I was with the snake’s face next to mine, which seemed a good opportunity, and decided he would probably be better off without the ticks anyway, so threw my dressing gown over his head and climbed up next to him. So by the time my cuppa was ready I was sitting on the roof pulling tcks from a python instead of the comfy sleep-in I had planned, but I did make up for it later.

Carpet python being escorted from the chicken coop to the creekbed

The snake may have been the same individual I had to remove from our chicken coop a couple of years ago (pictured here)

He hasn’t sun-baked on our roof again – perhaps being bundled into a dressing gown didn’t appeal to him – and is now mostly seen hanging around one of our storage sheds, hopefully helping to control any rats that might turn up.