I Don't Hate Snakes, I Looooove Snakes!

So I don’t know if/when I’ll be helping them out again, but for two weekends I went up north to help out Anthony, one of the reptile guys at the Travel Expo, with his animal shows. He actually has a bunch of different animals (not just reptiles) and does freelance animal talks for festivals, kids’ fairs, birthday parties, and school events. He’s apparently got a lot of people who do shows for him, although I don’t know if I will make it to that stage, haha, especially since I’m not planning on being in Sydney for that much longer. 

But anyway, the first trip took me up two hours north of Sydney, after some confusion on the train where I almost got on the wrong one and missed the right one because they were both leaving at the same time, but only one of them went to the right place on the weekend (yes, it was confusing). I made it there and Anthony drove us out to this park in Hornsby that was having a festival to celebrate becoming an official national park (the community petitioned to get it upgraded, which is cool). We set up a fold out tent canopy, and stored the animals there, and then Anthony started his loud speaker and the kids flocked around.

His talk reminded me of some of the animal shows I saw when I was little at the library or at school. He brought each animal out in turn, telling the kids about it and why it was good to have around, and most of them we could let the kids touch (I helped carry around the big python, but otherwise I was just watching and keeping the kids from crossing the rope around the tent). We had a tawny frogmouth (so cute and funky-looking!), a possum (very sleepy and cuddled inside a makeshift leaf nest), a treefrog that was 30 years old and about the size of a saucer (super cute), a goanna named Joanna, a diamond python named Precious, and a fruit bat named Annie (no one could touch the fruit bat, though)! He also brought out a fox pelt and told the kids about how he had saved the tawny frogmouth from the fox and how foxes shouldn’t be around in Australia. The whole tone of the talk was about protecting the animals from cats and foxes, providing habitat for them in their gardens (all of them were from the Sydney area), and teaching other people to like them by saying “I don’t hate snakes, I love snakes!” (this mantra was repeated many times for a lot of the animals and usually followed an anecdote about someone who wanted to chop down a tree that housed a possum, or was using pesticides that harm frogs, etc). He also stressed how happy he was to see the kids outside and not inside “watching a stupid DVD!” (which you have to say with a really strong Aussie accent). Anyway so that was fun and I got to play with the snake a bit and wind it around the upper spokes of the tent so it could explore.

Just to be confusing, here’s a picture of me from the expo after-party with an olive python and Rex, the guy who works at a reptile centre in Alice Springs.

The second time I went to a wildlife show run by Tom, one of Anthony’s workers. We went to a kids’ “fate” (spelling?) which is apparently like a school fair to fund school activities or something. There were lots of stalls with food you could buy and garage sale-style tables of used clothes and toys, as well as a jumping castle thing – and us in our tent. We had a few different animals than the last time, and I helped pass around more of them. First we had a blue-tongued skink, which was chilled out and fun because when its tongue flicked out it was like a big blue flower petal, and the skink gave lots of the kids little lizard kisses. Then one of the kids found a wild skink with a banged-up nose, and I ended up sticking it in my backpack for us to take back to Anthony’s place. We didn’t want it to interact with the show skink, just in case it had any diseases that could infect the captive one. I didn’t really mind having a skink in my backpack, it just made it hard to get to the rest of my stuff, including my camera, so I didn’t get any pics of anything.

We had the possum again, but this time it was a bit too inquisitive and started climbing out of its bowl of branches as I was showing it to the kids so then Tom took it back to keep it under control. No bat, but we had the ancient tree frog, the goanna, and the tawny frogmouth again, and a different type of python. This time it was a black-headed python which is just as it sounds, with a big black head but bronze everywhere else. Its name was Princess and I got to drape it over a few of the kids for them to hold, as well as wearing it looped around me for a while, which was fun. 

And we had a crocodile! He was pretty small, only about a metre long, but thick around and Tom said he was really strong and could thrash a lot. He let me hold him briefly, with one hand clamped around his head/neck (his jaws were taped shut, so no worries there) and the other at his tail. He was very well-behaved when I was holding him, and I was annoyed that the skink in my bag kept me from accessing my camera (well, holding the crocodile also made that difficult). Maybe I can get a pic next time.

We swung by Anthony’s place on the way back to the train station and he showed me some of the animal pens that he was finishing building where he had a bunch more snakes, bats, possums, and tawny frogmouths. The house was in a newly cleared area up a hill in the rainforest (subtropical, like what I saw in the Blue Mountains) and it was so pretty around there. I heard a bird with a very clear tone, and he said it was a Bell Mynah, which made sense. It was cool helping them out and learning about the animals and the presentations, and I hope I can do something again with them soon.