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I was amused by @mariner4life 's recent post about pythons, goannas and hens eggs and thought (and posted) "Straya!" due to the unique Strayaness of the post.
Anyone familiar with the works of Terry Pratchett mat have read The Last Continent which includes a line where anything in Fourecks (the Counterweight Continent) that is not poisonous is venomous. Straya!
Have a couple of Strayan type stories to share but no particular thread in which to share them. So thought I start here.
First story to follow ...
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So ... Am not swimming for a little while ...
At first it feels like a mozzie bite - but matchstick-sized creature's sting can be deadly
Within an hour a victim can be in a hospital bed experiencing pain akin to having 'an electric drill in the lower back'.
Straya!
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So ... Am not swimming for a little while ...
At first it feels like a mozzie bite - but matchstick-sized creature's sting can be deadly
Within an hour a victim can be in a hospital bed experiencing pain akin to having 'an electric drill in the lower back'.
BTW, those of you cynical about mainstream media ... two of the pictures in the article, the swimming enclosure and the no swimming sign, are somewhere else entirely. They are NOT Hervey Bay nor Fraser Island (no hills like that in the region). (The pier at the top however is.)
Channel 7.
Also Straya!
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"Patients describe the first spate of lower back pain as like having "an electric drill in the lower back".
Severe and frequent vomiting ensues, followed by sweating and headaches.
Gershwin says the pain often causes patients to ask doctors to "put them out of their misery".Throw in sharks, crocs, spiders, snakes and some fires...
"The lucky country"...really?
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"Patients describe the first spate of lower back pain as like having "an electric drill in the lower back".
Severe and frequent vomiting ensues, followed by sweating and headaches.
Gershwin says the pain often causes patients to ask doctors to "put them out of their misery".Throw in sharks, crocs, spiders, snakes and some fires...
"The lucky country"...really?
it's lucky that this country is mind-warpingly massive, so all that shit is spread out. We have bad snakes and shit here, but not those nasty spiders you get down south. And snakes generally won't fuck with you if you leave them alone. Except Taipans, those motherfuckers are just evil.
Crocs are my biggest worry up here. It really limits where you can take your kids camping, because anywhere close to the coast is liable to have a 4m+ saltie just waiting for one of them to visit the waters edge. And they are everywhere. I'm with that mad fluffybunny Katter, time to shoot a few.
And my bushfire risk is, for the time being, very slight.
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@mariner4life said in Straya!:
snakes generally won't fuck with you if you leave them alone
That "generally" bit doesn't reassure me.
I'm good here thanks, got stung by a wasp last week, way bad enough for me. You can keep the rest of your critters.
it's lucky that this country is mind-warpingly massive
It really is ay. I used to be SYD based and fly HKG- SYD very regularly, it made me laugh when the new cabin crew would come in ask "where are we?" which was code for "are we there yet?". I discovered that they didn't get "shut up Donkey" so I would reply " just entered Aus airspace".
"Great, not to far to go then".
The concept of time elapsed versing flight time did seem to mystify some of them.
We were about half way to SYD.
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No one has died in Australia from a spider bite in decades.
Even with snakes as long as you don't panic you've got hours. You just need to minimise movement.
Salties are creatures of habit.
Stay out of the water and there's no problem with sharks.
The most dangerous creatures here are the women.
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@Snowy you should have seen the size of the wasp i killed on the weekend. bigger than my finger. evil mother fucker.
The size of Queensland was starkly brought in to focus this time last year when we drove to the Gold Coast. After about 22 hours of driving we hadn't got out of Qld, but it was only another 900km to Sydney.
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@mariner4life funny you should mention taipans, which was the original inspiration for this thread, just had to find (and resize) photos ...
Anyway, this is Sammy:
Sammy decided to come and live with us. We are happy about that as it means we have a healthy and diverse natural environment in our backyard. Straya!
Bloke at work, who by all accounts has done numerous snake training things, advised Sammy was a coastal taipan (refer below). Which is awesome as they are only the third most venomous snake in the world (behind inland taipan and eastern brown). Various sources suggest coastal taipan venom can kill a human in 35 minutes. Which is cool as the ambulance and hospital is only 20 mins away (do the maths).
Taipans can also apparently actually see you, not just detect your movement like other snakes, and can move quicker than you run.
This is Misty:
This is Cleo:
Misty is lithe and athletic, and thick as two short planks.
Cleo is small and insignificant, and plotting world domination.Misty and Cleo are the illegitimate offspring of the promiscuity of one of Ms Boo Jr's buddy's farm cats and the local feral toms. Straya!
This is Sammy now:
We are sad. It appears Sammy was MURDERED! by Misty and Cleo.
We found dead Sammy being poked and prodded and tossed around like prey as cats do by Misty. And interestingly we originally found live Sammy as it was being poked and prodded by Cleo (oh bugger, she's got a lizard ... hang on ... that lizard doesn't have legs ... ).
We like Misty and Cleo.
Anyways ... old mate who reckoned it was a coastal taipan may have been mistaken. The 'What Snake is That?' FB page ( https://m.facebook.com/story/graphql_permalink/?graphql_id=UzpfSTEwMDAwMDAyMjQ3NDQyMjpWSzoxMDAyMTE2NDkwMTgyNzc3 ) suggests it is a Yellow Faced Whip Snake, which isn't deadly (if indeed they are the same snake.)
Apparently multiple snakes in this part of the Bay.
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Pretty much almost stepped on this guy in the chicken shed who got stuck in the netting. I did the right thing and cut him free. A small Red-bellied black snake. I always seem to see them at the last minute and my brain thinks it is a piece of old tyre before the flight or fight instinct kicks in and I jump back and think "Fuck that was close"
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Just let me clarify this - you were happy with having the 3rd most venomous snake in the world living next to you and it can out run you (I acknowledge that you had a 15 minute time gap before one of you died, so it's all just fine) but personally I wouldn't feel very comfortable with that.
I also suspect that Misty and Cleo have more clues about snakes than the "bloke at work".
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Just let me clarify this - you were happy with having the 3rd most venomous snake in the world living next to you and it can out run you (I acknowledge that you had a 15 minute time gap before one of you died, so it's all just fine) but personally I wouldn't feel very comfortable with that.
I also suspect that Misty and Cleo have more clues about snakes than the "bloke at work".
Oh yeah. Fucking delighted.
Coincidentally, further to the above and post yesterday in the Podcast thread see link below I stumbled across just now.
Listen to the intro to see just how delighted you would be to have a coastal taipan anywhere in the vicinity.
"Conversations" , with Richard Fidler-Sarah Kanowski
I'm listening to the "Best of 2018: Hunting the deadly coastal taipan" episode from "Conversations" , presented by Richard Fidler-Sarah Kanowski - https://abclisten.page.link/76zfDfptyXKh44gb9. Available now through the ABC listen App - http://bit.ly/ABCradioApp -
Not snake related.
I have a 1-year-old collie/kelpie cross. mad as fuck. Great dog though. He doesn't bite or really excessively whine or bark. Kids love him, the Mrs cats(yes plural) fucken hate him but he loves them.
Anyway a few months ago, one night(11ish) I hear a bat/flying fox outside making a bit of a racket. There are a few fruit trees in my street so I didn't make much of it. Bats are always around. But then it got louder and then I could hear the dog growling. I got out of bed to have a look and my dog is having a fight with a huge fucking bat. There's some back and forth but the dog is getting the best of this thing and it's screaming. I intervene, on the wife's say so and a neighbour shouting at me to "sort it the fuck out". It suddenly started pissing down(I wish I was making this up). My back yard is landscaped chaos. Big fucken boulders everywhere, flax bushes, palm trees...a fucken obstacle course filled with golden orb spider webs. So Im out there trying not to walk into, face first, palm-sized spiders fending off a crazed dog, protecting a winged harbinger of germs and disease. Trying not to slip over in the fast forming puddles in my yard because there is no such thing as drainage in this country.
I had never minded Fruit Bats until that night. Close up they were kind of cute. However, seeing one walk across the ground in the ungodly manner that it did changed my perspective. If you are ever curious look up "bat walking" on youtube. Nightmarish stuff. There was a moment where I really had to almost belt the dog in order to get him off the bat and I never hit my dog. The weirdest thing happened though. The bat just kind of accepted that I was helping it and never bit me or swiped at me. I was able to pick it up and carefully place(throw) it over the fence to safety. Then I went inside and chopped both my hands off.
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i like how you gave your cats stripper names
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@mariner4life said in Straya!:
i like how you gave your cats stripper names
Blame the wife and 16 yo.
Straya!
