It's a tough call. Cyclists are adamant that magpies struck much earlier this year. Asthmatics are adamant that the pollen season started earlier (Pollen Canberra has charts showing a spike in pollen in Canberra two weeks earlier than usual).
But the snakes don't want to know.
A few eastern browns have already been spotted and captured in urban Canberra this spring but Gavin Smith, the expert from the Australian National University (who is also a snake catcher), says the reptiles emerged from hibernation at their usual time.
The first recording this year was of males coming out of their winter burrows in August 3.
"Although this may appear quite early, I would argue that it is fairly consistent with what I observed last season," Dr Smith said.
Dr Smith is a sociologist at the ANU but he also runs ACT Snake Removals. He's been busy this past week, starting it off with an eastern brown in a drive-way in Kambah, and ending it with a release in a remote part of the bush in the ACT.
He can be very precise about when snakes come out of hibernation because he's running a tracking project at the ANU. Video cameras are situated outside burrows and data chips the size of a grain of rice are embedded under snakes' scales.
Snakes are cold-blooded animals (ectotherms, in scientific parlance) so they need external warmth. Dr Smith says that makes them "entirely attuned to the environment and hyper-sensitive to climatic factors, and are thus an excellent organism to measure climate change".
So who's right, the snakes or the magpies?
"I think that the snake man is right," Hugh McDowell, senior climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, said.
"There doesn't seem to be anything in the temperature which suggests that spring is earlier than usual so the snake man seems to be right."
Maximum temperatures for September are about the same as usual and minima are slightly lower.
But September is only half over and there is a warm front on the way so the average could yet be bumped up, he said - but so far, so average.
And he says that the figures put the past winter as the warmest on record. The globe is warming.
Even though, this year is not noticeably different from others, Dr Smith says this is the time for snakes.
"This is a peak time for movement activity for locally occurring snakes such as the eastern brown, red-bellied black and tiger.
"At this time of year, male snakes will generally move more often and travel further distances in search of female snakes to breed with."
Dr Smith is trying to educate the public into treating them better. "If you look at snake bite statistics on humans they unequivocally reveal that these animals are very keen to avoid a confrontation and are disinclined to bite unless they are being physically threatened or interacted with.
"Either leave the snake alone by giving it plenty of distance, and ensuring pets and small children are kept inside or away from it. Or can call a snake handler such as myself to have it safely relocated".
