The quickest way to tell the difference between an eastern brown snake and a copperhead is to nearly step on it. If it strikes, it’s an eastern brown. If it stays still as you jump back, it’s a copperhead.
Thankfully, the snake I nearly stood on this week as I walked distractedly through the horse yard was a copperhead. Lowland copperheads are the seventh most venomous snake in Australia, but they are also shy and only bite when severely provoked. They are pretty common here in the Macedon Ranges. This is the second time I’ve nearly stepped on this particular snake. I also didn’t see it when carrying washing out to the line last month. Both times it skedaddled.
It’s a big year for snakes. It was the hottest spring on record in Australia, with temperatures 2C above the long-term average. The hot, dry conditions have brought a host of new animals to our place: Yellow-tailed black cockatoos in from the forests, sulphur-crested cockatoos from the plains, and snakes – so many snakes – out from their hiding spots to bask in watered gardens and sneak drinks from the dog bowl.
With its rocky soils and rocky garden and rocky rocks, my home is snake city. A few years ago, during a panicked call to a local snake catcher, I was told we had everything “except probably taipans” and to just wear thick boots.
Most years we see maybe two all summer.
This year we’ve seen a beautiful 1.5m tiger snake in the woodshed; an eastern brown booking it across the lawn when we were mowing; half a baby eastern brown with tell-tale kookaburra beak marks in the horse paddock; a 1m long snakeskin which flicked on to my foot when I was whipper-snippering the long grass behind the shed (resulting in several unplanned drainage holes to the overflow pipe); and the aforementioned repeat copperhead sightings.
That’s enough to put our labrador, Charley, on leash jail for the rest of summer. He earned this treatment last year when he attempted to pick up a snake and had to go on a 48-hour vet watch. I suggested to the vet that we try snake awareness training, but she said it wouldn’t work: he’s already aware that snakes are fun. Avoidance is the only option.
It’s not only in central Victoria that snakes are on the move. My social media feeds are full of people playing a game of “does it have legs or not” – a game I’ve become very familiar with, thanks to the two blue tongued lizards who live beneath the house. The trick, usually, is that if you hear it rustling, it’s a lizard. If you don’t hear anything, it’s a snake. The other trick is to remember that the only snake with a head big enough to be mistaken for a blue tongue is a king brown, and you should stop trying to get a closer look.
Dr Timothy Jackson, the co-head of the Australian Venom Research Unit at the University of Melbourne, has made 40 tiger snake sightings – which he reckons is probably only 15-20 individual snakes – on his daily walks in Melbourne’s western suburbs so far this season. “Sometimes I will see four or five snakes on a single walk,” he says.
“I walk all the time and walk past snakes that are basking near the trail. It is crazy to me how people don’t seem to spot them.”
So anecdotally there’s a lot about – and anecdotal evidence is all we’ve got, because there is no baseline data on snake numbers in Australia. Even the most robust studies into specific small populations are hampered by snakes being just really very good at not being found.
It makes sense, Jackson says, that snakes are more visible in certain conditions. Very hot weather can overwhelm their ability to thermoregulate and send them searching for new shelter. The removal of vegetation in favourite basking spots sends them searching for new hideouts. And dry conditions will see them looking for water – including, in urban environments, in back yard pools or even in the house.
In a joint article in the Conversation, Jackson and his co-authors wrote that a study in Perth found that snakes emerged from shelter only once the temperature reached 16C, provided it wasn’t raining. Under the worst-case climate scenario of 5C warming by the end of the century, they wrote, more days will meet that threshold. Snakes may emerge earlier in the season and need to hunt more.
They will also be even more active in the times we erroneously think of as “safe” from snakes: early morning, early evening and the middle of the night.
That a warming climate could result in more human-snake encounters, especially in cities like Melbourne, which Jackson describes as “prime tiger snake habitat’, is a “reasonable inference”, he says.
It’s enough reason to refresh your first aid knowledge and keep a close eye on your pets – especially if, like Charley, their curiosity trumps their survival skills.
Jackson is pushing for more research into the conditions that surround human-snake encounters, so we can work at reducing those interactions. Generally, he says, snakes want to avoid humans and are very good at it. It’s like sharks at the beach: most of us never notice they’re there.
So I’ll be wearing thick boots and walking with care. And hopefully we’ll keep avoiding each other.
