Aussie man shocked by 'elusive' find on roadside: 'Blends in really well'

Yahoo

21-03-2025

A wildlife enthusiast was delighted to finally locate the very thing he had spent days looking for, not quite believing he found the "dangerously venomous" creature on a busy road in a major Aussie city.
Jesse Campbell is constantly on the hunt for snakes and admitted to Yahoo News his favourite species is the death adder although he seldom spots one in the wild — not because there isn't many of them, but because they're "secretive".
"They aren't rare but they're really elusive. You don't see them very often down here but there's lots of them. They have really good camouflage... so you don't tend to bump heads with them very often," he told Yahoo News.
He spotted the snake on a busy road near Sydney's Royal National Park and explained it was showing defensive behaviour when he approached it.
"These snakes aren't able to move fast, they're short and fat and they purposefully flatten themselves out and stay still as a defence mechanism to try and make itself bigger and scarier," he said.
Despite the snakes being highly venomous and their potent venom capable of killing a human in under six hours, Jesse believes the snakes are in urgent need of a rebrand and have been misrepresented for a long time.
"They were initially called deaf adders because early explorers would walk up towards them in the bush and the snakes wouldn't move, leaving people to think they couldn't hear. But after they bit and killed a few people, that's when they got the bad name of death adder... it's unfair," he explained.
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There are only five known deaths recorded from a death adder within a 100-year-period, according to the Australian Geographic, but the name has haunted the reputation of the species.
"They're dangerously venomous but they're really laid back, gentle snakes," Jesse said. "They've got great eyesight and they can see you coming from a mile away, and they want nothing to do with you. It's mind-boggling that people say snakes chase you because I've only ever seen the opposite."
The snakes use an interesting strategy to catch their prey and it's one of the reasons Jesse loves the misunderstood species so much.
"So they're ambush predators, they use a caudal lure on the end of their tail which involves them laying motionless buried in the leaves with just their head and tail sticking out," he said. "They wiggle their tail to draw in birds or lizards or rodents who come thinking they're going to eat a worm."
Despite their vibrant colour, death adders are able to "blend in really well" to an environment that has heavy leaf litter or pine needles around.
"They're just this little viper that lives on the ground," he said.
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