Surfeit Of Serpents

Left: Snake catcher Geoff Brouff with a handful of snakes he found at Esther Honegger's Fannie Bay home. Picture: BRAD FLEET


It's important to remember these babies aren't poisonous. Mean, nasty, ill-tempered, and aggressive, yes, but fairly benign by Australian standards (via Wicked Thoughts):

IT WOULD be enough to put phobia sufferers in their grave - 14 baby carpet pythons slithering around in your bedroom.

Esther Honegger was "horrified" when she found the baby snakes in her Fannie Bay home.

"I thought 'Oh my God, how many of them are there?'," she said.

"I hate snakes and as I walked backwards and forwards I would see another one."

"They were everywhere - there was one curled around my bedhead, another around the bottom of the chair, and when I went outside there was one in the hallway, another on the (stair) railing and another on the step.

"It was like I was having a nightmare.

"Everywhere I looked they just kept popping up."

The self-employed driving instructor first noticed the snakes when going to bed about 9pm on Wednesday.

She called friends, who she says didn't believe her, and then called the police.

She was then told to call the 24-hour snake hotline.

Snake catcher Geoff Brouff attended her home on Geoffrey Crescent and managed to wrangle seven of the snakes.

But the next morning he received another frantic call from Ms Honegger who had found five more of the reptiles in her house.

Another trip back to her unit on Thursday afternoon found another two.

Ms Honegger is now tippy toeing around her home as Mr Brouff said it was likely there could be more hiding around the place.

"Carpet snakes lay an average of 25 to 30 eggs so yeah it's definitely possible there will be more," he said.

He said the mother was likely living in the roof and the babies came through the air-conditioner vents.