Australia Weather News

Deadly snakes are on the move in Central Australia thanks to recent rain and cooler temperatures.

Eastside resident Natalie O'Conner knows this all too well.

It was a Sunday afternoon and she was feeding the family's beloved chook, Robyn, when she noticed something out of the corner of her eye.

"There was this beautiful bright orange tail that was poking all the way out from a little mouse burrow, which was next to that feeding bin," she said.

That orange tail belonged to a highly venomous western brown snake, coiled around the water source.

"That obviously gave me a little bit of a fright," Ms O'Conner said.

"Then it started kind of retracting and coming back out of the hole. So I had to do a quick little side step that way to get past it."

Ms O'Conner said it only took the snake catcher seven minutes to arrive at her property, but during that time the snake disappeared down another mouse burrow.

"Our snake catcher was vigilant and started a 40-50-minute kind of process of grabbing the hose and trying to flush this snake out by filling up the mouse burrows," she said.

"We did quite a bit of crushing of where the burrows would possibly be to reduce its exit points.

"We were really lucky, because this snake hadn't exited by any other passageway and eventually came back up," she said.

Ms O'Conner could barely see the black head camouflaged under the dark soil.

"It's glistening, there's dirt and other stuff kind of bubbling to the surface," she said.

Ms O'Conner said the snake's head emerged once the water receded.

"It did do this flicker of the tongue to really show us that it was pretty irritated."

Long, hot summer 

Rex Neindorf has been an Alice Springs snake catcher for 25 years and said January call-out numbers were below previous years.

"We are under 100 for the month, whereas normally it would be probably around about the 130 to 140 mark," he said.

"The simple reason why is, it's been hot and dry."

The town of Alice Springs has experienced one of the hottest Januaries since 2019, with 22 days over 40 degrees Celsius.

"The daily mean temperature was 41 degrees, which is 4.5 degrees above the long-term average," said Rebecca Patrick, senior meteorologist with NT Bureau of Meteorology.

Mr Neindorf said snakes were "quite smart" and normally moved about in the early morning and late at night.

"They do the same thing almost every single day," he said. 

"They wake up, they go out for a bit of a look. If there's food, they will grab the food and go back to bed."

Mr Neindorf said this year's hot and dry summer had affected the lifecycle of the snake.

"Usually in a summer, in Alice Springs, we get lots of rainfall," he said.

"[The town] gets rain depressions moving in from up north, and then they force their way down into Central Australia, but that hasn't happened.

"So because it's been hot and dry, that's affected really everything."

Mr Neindorf said snakes were sensitive to changes in humidity and became more active as the weather changed.

"You can see a whole massive amount of call-outs just over the last couple of days," he said.

"Just the last two days has seen an increased amount of movement, and when it rains, that will set everything off.

"That sets the insects off ... [which] sets the geckos and the skinks off. It also sets the mice off, and that sets the snakes off. So it just goes in a big cycle."

Mr Neindorf said later in February and March could be potentially busy with the recent rainfall.