Aussie dad's startling 26kg find while locking up home: 'Some big ones out there'
'I know we don't get anacondas, but this is an anaconda. He's like a dinosaur,' the startled homeowner told Jay Everdeen from Close Encounters Reptile Removal over the phone just minutes later.
After jumping in the car and heading to the property in Mareeba, a rural town outside of Cairns, for what he believed was a routine 11.30pm call-out, the snake catcher soon understood the dad's astonishment.
An enormous 5.2-metre-long scrub python weighing a whopping 26.4kg had tightly coiled itself around a downpipe — and it wasn't budging. 'When I saw him I was like, 'oh geez, this is big',' Jay told Yahoo News Australia on Thursday, adding the snake was 'thicker than a two-litre Coke bottle' and appeared to be trying to climb into the roof.
'When I had hold of him, my fingertips didn't touch,' he recalled.
With the help of his 12-year-old daughter, who he's training to follow in his footsteps, Jay worked for an hour to unwrap the non-venomous python from the pipe.
'He wrapped half of his body around one way and the other half the other way so it's like a U shape. So when you're pulling one way, the other part of the body's coming around with it,' he said.
Jay, a landscaper who is used to lifting heavy items, said the snake was so strong he wondered if he'd be able to remove it at all. 'He's just got that much power, and that's why it took an hour,' he told Yahoo. 'Snakes like that you can get tangled up in and you're stuck, you won't get out of it.'
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After much perseverance, Jay was able to place the scrub python — Australia's largest snake species — into a bag, but it was too large to move.
'The person who owns the house got me this really big beach towel to put my bag on top of and tie the towel up because with my bag, I just couldn't pick him up,' he said, noting snakes can still bite through the fabric, which ultimately ripped during transit.
The next day the snake catcher and his four children held up the reptile to show his neighbour's kids the sheer size of the reptile before relocating it. 'A good snake is a beautiful snake to see in the wild,' he said.
And while the python's hefty weight was impressive, Jay told Yahoo there are undoubtedly 'bigger ones' lingering in mountain scrub or near rivers.
'There's some big ones out there, and people just haven't come across them.'
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