An Aussie snake catcher got more than what he bargained for upon inspecting a Queensland home’s roof space.
In a video initially posted on Facebook, Brandon Troy Gifford can be seen extracting numerous snakes from under the roof’s insulation.
The former Australia Zoo reptile keeper was called to a Moreton Bay home to investigate the source of an unusual amount of noise coming from the ceiling.
“So we’re up doing a roof inspection, and look who’s down here – not our target but a beautiful little brown tree snake all curled up,” Mr Gifford says in the video.
Five brown tree snakes can be seen crawling in the video, hiding in various places along the roof’s crawl space.
“No wonder there’s so many skins everywhere,” he says.
This snake can typically be found in northern, eastern and southern Australia, commonly along the coastline down to Sydney.
Around the home the snake can most frequently be encountered in roofs or sheds and climbing around outdoors in trees or on patios.
“And they call them cat-eyed snakes,” Mr Gifford explains. “You can see why – he’s got beautiful cat eyes but mildly venomous.”
Brown tree snakes are mildly venomous, but are not considered dangerous to an adult human, but a reaction can occur if a child is bitten.
No known deaths have ever been recorded.
Due to their rear fanged nature, a bite from the snake is unlikely, but still possible.
A snake skeleton was also found during the roof inspection.
“So we don’t need to relocate him, but far out,” the catcher joked upon discovering the skull.
The number of snakes found certainly helped explain the abundance of snake skins lying around.
“But as you can see, he’s a bit dull,” Mr Gifford said in the video, showing off one of the caught snakes.
“He’s about to shed again,” he continued. “So we got him out before he left one more shed.”
All of the snakes were bagged up and released into an area of bushland appropriate for snake habitat.
“Well, we’ve picked a nice bit of bush on purpose that has access to a lot of lizards, a lot of rodents, but, more importantly, a lot of birds,” Mr Gifford explained.