Scales

One thing about relief teaching is you never know what you’ll be doing on a day. Which is how I ended up touching my first ever live snake on Friday.

Snake!

This tiger snake shed her skin the day before. Those gold highlights aren’t light reflecting, they are actual streaks of gold in her scales.

There are only three species of snake in Tasmania, all are poisonous. The tiger snake is the 6th most venomous in the world. Lucky us 🙂

And this guy was standing in the middle of a complete set – tigers, copperheads and white lipped snakes. They were climbing his leg, hiding under tubs and generally ignoring him. It was the best demonstration I’ve ever seen of the fact snakes get used to your presence, and as a result can be slow to react when you come across them. Snakes won’t chase you. Their only interest is in getting away.

He also showed a ‘snake bite kit’. Two compression bandages. He gave the example that by tightly wrapping the bitten limb and sitting very still you could last 8 hours after a bite. If after being bitten you ran the length of the schoolyard to the house, you probably would be dead before you got there.

Please excuse the poor quality photos – taken on my phone in terrible lighting.

There were a range of other reptiles and spiders there, but this blue tongue was my favourite.

She’s a bit shabby because she was shedding her skin.
This is what blue tongues usually look like.

The pure black one is apparently the opposite of an albino.