Flaviemys purvisi
Very Well-Known Member
AUGUST 27, 2018
Talisa Eley
SHE is being hailed as the bravest woman in Brisbane for wrangling not one, but two large pythons who made themselves at home in a backyard barbecue, but 81-year-old Faye Morgan said it is all in a day’s work.
The petite woman, who only measures 150cms tall, looked relaxed as she removed the two-metre-long pythons one at a time, placing them in a plastic box at her home in Kholo, in Brisbane’s southwest on Sunday morning.
“I’ve developed my skills through trial and error, it is quite challenging, they’ve very heavy,” she said.
“I wasn’t scared though, these weren’t all that big, but big enough to eat a small cat.”
The quietly spoken “super nanna” as she’s been dubbed on social media said snakes are a common occurrence in the rural area where she’s lived for 40 years and are attracted to the back veranda by her rescue birds.
“I don’t think it was anything special to be honest,” she said, “this was the first time I’ve seen two at the same time though, which made it tricky to get both of them, we were only expecting one and found the other underneath.”
Dry conditions and a lack of food in the bush is luring the snakes to homes as they wake up for mating season.
Ms Morgan puts her reptile skills to the test around eight times a year, moving the curious snakes down to “a nice comfy place” in the long grass near the Brisbane River after they venture into her house.
“The trick is not to rush it unless they’re on the move,” she said, “you’ve got to get your hand just behind head so they can’t whip around and bite you, and the other near to the tail, because that’s the strong part, they can wrap themselves around you.”
However the snake whisperer isn’t encouraging anyone to take a leaf from her book “strongly” discouraging people to try it at home.
The pythons aren’t venomous but they can leave a nasty bite, she said.
Ms Morgan counts herself lucky, only being bitten once, by a smaller feisty snake, in her many years of snake wrangling.
And the independent octogenarian isn’t planning to call in help any time soon, still single-handedly running her small farm, doing up to 10 hours a day.
