Cool Pool Python

Townsville is a direct contrast to Cairns regarding appearance. Cairns is lucious green, Townsville is crispy yellow. This is because the Cairns coast line and mountains face East and receive regular rain from the prevailing winds. With a twist of geology Townsville’s coast runs parallel to the wind so it only gets rain for about 3 months after Christmas.

The steep hillside behind the house Magnus lives in is used for Military exercises, so to all intents it is a nature reserve covered with scrub; the night time creatures provide a rousing chorus and some of the slimmer ones can escape the peripheral fence.

 Like many Australian properties there is a small swimming pool in the garden and in the evening we thought to have a swim, but Magnus was not so sure. A wavering dark shadow underwater at one of the pool cleaning outlets indicated an alien body inhabited the sieve. The question was would taking the lid off the sieve provoke a jack in the box effect? Very bravely I thought, he levered the lid off and retreated with speed. From his various exclamations, it had to be a snake.  And indeed, curled up comfortably in the water swirl, was a large carpet python, a little startled at having the roof of its retreat removed, but with a stubborn settling of its sinuous water-marked silk body, definitely not planning to leave soon. We estimated that uncurled it would be about 9 foot long.

The choice was to winkle it out with the pool broom handle and hope it would head for the hills, or to ring the landlord who is the official snake remover for the area to come and remove it, or to put the lid back and get on with the swim.

It was surprising how much more intimate a feeling it was being at eye level with each other and separated only by a yard or so of water; it looking out of overflow slit intently at us, we looking back  with equal consistency and all of us hoping that the others would not invade personal space.

Sadly, it had moved on by next morning – jussst too many touristsss my dear!
Morelia spilota,  due to its size, checked against other visitations, probably sub-species  mcdowelli. Pythons enjoy bathing especially after shedding their skin.