So, here's a lesson for us all. DONT try to kill, or handle, any snake!!!
Is it acceptable to poke them a little bit with a stick?
Just kidding of course.. lol
On a seriouser? note though. One day at work, I went to pick up a piece of 50mm battery cable from the pile of offcuts near the bench (kept for short battery links etc), when one of the pieces of cable moved!!!! It was a small red bellied black snake!!! So I "poked it a bit" with a piece of tig wire to chase it outside and the bl**dy thing dissapeared into a length of 19mm heatshrink tubing, also lying in the pile. Seeing as the heatshrink had been lying on the ground with the last 200mm of it's end bent over, it was effectively sealed at that end, so I thought .. fair enough, I'll pick up the tubing, throw it out the door into the bush and it can go free. Halfway to the door the head of the snake popped out of the tubing, it had done a "U" turn inside the heatshrink. I got a bit of a fright, dropped the heatshrink beside this truck that a mate was working under, and the snake decided to join him under the truck. I yelled out to him that there was a snake under the truck, and of course his reply was "p*$$ off you d*(# head" , untill he saw it moving towards him.. So after he broke the world speed record for a person sliding along on concrete on their back, we both then had to "poke it a bit" with a couple of brooms to convince it that it was nicer outdoors.
Place we used to work tourist seasons at had a pretty dark toolshed. It was not kept very tidy. The men used to kick stuff aout of their way, all the time, including polypipe and coils of rope. Group of schoolkids came to stay and the boss rocks up with huge - like 5 or 6 metre long - olive python, to show them. The Driver asks where boss found that. Reply was that it was the one that lives, all coiled up, in the corner of the toolshed. The men were a bit more careful after that!
In 2006 we were working at a remote construction site in the Pilbara. The site had just been cleared for the buildings to go in, and there were some displaced death adders around. One of the men came into my office quite shaken because he'd walked closely around a dump of metal sheets and trod on tail of death adder, which struck at his boot. Steel capped, fortunately. He said the snake had hightailed it and gone up under one of the dongas in the lay-down area - there were a lot of these stored there until they could be craned into place. Only problem was - there was not, as yet, a toilet on site, and I had been in the habit of "going" in one of the narrow spaces between the dongas! After that, I had to drive 3km each way to the temporary fly camp, each time!!!
