SOME BLOKES, A BROOM AND A COPPERHEAD

I meant to put this in my previous post. Really, it warrants its own post.

Some time in mid-January, my boy and I were out walking our cocker spaniel. We came to the pub. A drinker, standing in the front beer garden stated flatly, 'Watch out for the brown snake'. Indeed, a brownish snake was moving lethargically along the pavement by the wall that skirts the beer garden. I tied my dog to a railing and my son and I tentatively checked out the snake, which was about fifty centimetres long. Soon, walkers and drinkers alike were all out looking at it.

Consensus had the snake as a Highlands Copperhead, not an Eastern Brown Snake. The serpent got itself into a gutter. One drinker suggested he jump in his Toyota and run the snake over, adding that misguided cliche, 'The only good snake is a dead snake'. One bloke turned up with a broom and approached the snake. I asked him not to kill the thing. A passing 4WD was stopped, so the driver wouldn't crush the Copperhead. The broom-man brushed the snake away, so it slithered sluggishly across the road and retreated into the bushes by the railway station.

This was the fist living Highlands Copperhead I'd seen. My brother-in-law over in Bowral has had to kill a couple as he has many kids to think about. I've seen their cool bodies slung over barbed wire fences.

Herpetologist, Harold Cogger, states, in one of his textbooks, that Exeter is the Copperhead capital of NSW (I saw one there the other day - eastern side of railway line). I guess Bundy would be the other capital.

LJ, March 6 2012.