Canberra: Australia is renowned for its diverse and sometimes intimidating wildlife, including some of the world’s largest and most venomous snakes. However, a recent video has brought renewed attention to an extraordinary encounter a Queensland family had in their backyard last year with a 16-foot carpet python. The footage of this tree-hopping reptile causing quite a stir in the neighborhood has gone viral on social media.
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Carpet pythons, native to Australia and New Guinea, inhabit a range of environments, from rainforests and woodlands to grasslands and deserts. While these non-venomous snakes are primarily nocturnal, all six subspecies of carpet pythons, which can exceed lengths of 10 feet, have been encountered by locals during daylight hours.
The recorded incident captured a remarkably lengthy snake, equivalent to the height of three average-sized women, as it maneuvered from a rooftop to a tree and then onto another. The family’s astonishment is palpable in the clip, with one child audibly screaming in horror as the python momentarily emerges from the tree.
Dan, a snake catcher from the Sunshine Coast, shed light on this behavior, attributing the snake’s gliding ability to millions of years of evolution and “perfectly distributed muscles”. He explained to Yahoo News Australia, “Their muscles, distributed properly, hold them up. They reach out for a strong point, then they use muscle and weight to hold themselves up before stretching out to the next spot. It’s quite common to see carpet pythons in trees, either soaking up the sun, avoiding dogs or people, or hunting birds and possums. I find more pythons on the ground hunting than I do in the trees, but it’s not uncommon.”
