snake holes??

[Mitella]

My suggestion would be to get/buy(if you want to) an Inspection Camera.....

 

[Cougar2007]

Looks like a rat or mouse hole to me. I have quite a few of them here. My aviaries attract rats and mice all the time.

 

[Justdragons]

I would be betting on mouse or rat.. have you got a go pro or anything?? set it on time lapse photos and put it near by in the garden or something.. if there is anything in there surely it would come out at night??

 

[ronhalling]

We do have a marsupial mole in Australia but I don't imagine they would be found in that type of soil, would think they would be in more sandy environments, but it certainly is possible. It's not a spider burrow. Stick your hand down it and see what's attached to your fingers when you pull it out.

The soil from Renmark through to Mildura is all red sand, residents spend a fortune putting in topsoil to try and have gardens, the only areas that are not red sand are within 500m of the Murray River which is sediment from all the floods. If you all have another look at the pic Jesssie put up you will notice the hole has been made from beneath the grass not from above like a digging animal such as a lizard or Bandicoot would make, hence my thinking probably "Southern Marsupial Mole" which does have northern South Australia as part of its range.....................Ron

 

[Bluetongue1]

There are two basic possibilities for the hole that you saw. One is that it an exit hole for an organism that has lived underground. The other is that it is a burrow constructed in which to live. There are a number of organisms which might construct such a burrow. Marsupial moles are out – they fill in the burrows they create and spend most of their life around a metre underground. Spiders are out, as they line their burrow with web. Scorpions are out as they dig in more vertical faces and produce a D-shaped burrow with the flat edge at the top. Lizards are out as they are similar to scorpions, but the D-shaped entrance has the flat side at the bottom. Native rodents are not a possibility, as they construct a complex of burrows that have various exits in association with one another, including numerous vertical ‘pop holes’. Introduced rodents are not a consideration for they burrow horizontally under material that provides shelter and line their nests with dead grass. Whilst snakes may make use of burrows large enough to accommodate them, very few excavate their own burrows. The notable exceptions belonging to the Aspidities genus.

What you may have is an exit hole for a cicada nymph. It may be temporarily occupied by a spider or gecko. It will not provide a hiding place for a snake of any substance. Snakes will stick their snout down any holes they find in the chance that they may locate a meal hiding within. That does not mean they will camp in such overly confined surrounds. I would not entirely discount yabbies as a number of species will wander an appreciable distance from a water body. They will burrow into soil that is moist and cocoon themselves until adequate rains awake them and they burrow out again. The fact that some travel farther than others is an in-built evolutionary feature to maximise their long-term chances of survival, even if it cost the lives of a percentage of animals in the mean time.

Blue

 

[Renenet]

Could definitely be a cicada nymph hole. I had an entire wave of northern cherrynose nymphs metamorphose into adults a couple of months ago. I'm pretty sure they were responsible for the holes that appeared in my yard at about the same time.

Have you noticed any shed insect skins about the place recently? Similar to the ones in this thread?

 

[Jesssie]

Yeah I've pretty much been able to discount most animals suggested, as their holes/burrows don't fit with the one in my yard, other than the distance a yabbie would have to travel, the hole doesn't have that mud "chimney" type build up around the opening which made me think it wasn't a yabbie.

I didn't end up setting up a trap or flushing it with water, but what I DID do, to see if something was living in there, was place a few twigs (broken up to fit over each hole) over the openings in a kind of * pattern so I could see if something came or went and roughly how big it was (by how far it needed to push the twigs away to enter/exit). I checked it this arvo, and low and behold, something (I'm guessing roughly the size of the hole itself, as it had to push the twigs aside completely) had come or gone from the hole that I photographed. The other hole was untouched. So we do have a critter of some sort for sure lol.

Could definitely be a cicada nymph hole. I had an entire wave of northern cherrynose nymphs metamorphose into adults a couple of months ago. I'm pretty sure they were responsible for the holes that appeared in my yard at about the same time.

Have you noticed any shed insect skins about the place recently? Similar to the ones in this thread?

That actually looks really cool. But no, I haven't seen anything like that.

I've just sussed out cicada nymph holes on the net and they all look waaayyy too small. You could easily drop a billiard ball down this hole hey!

 

[-Peter]

It is a breathing hole, someone is buried alive is your garden...

 

[Jesssie]

It is a breathing hole, someone is buried alive is your garden...

Sssshhhhh keep it on the down low!! Haha

 

[Renenet]

I've just sussed out cicada nymph holes on the net and they all look waaayyy too small. You could easily drop a billiard ball down this hole hey!

Maybe it was a MASSIVE cicada nymph.

Okay, so maybe not a cicada nymph.

 

[Umbral]

It was made by a Triksiest husbandius using a broomhadlius to fool you.

 

[cement]

I know there are people here who say this and that does and doesn't happen, but yes you will get snakes living in holes like that. I have had RBBS doing exactly that and coming out to bask daily then going back down the hole. The hole was in the middle of a sloped grassed yard. There were no tracks or excavated material around the hole. These are rat burrows and down in there there is a rat nest lined with grass, there will be one or two other holes that they have for escape from snakes. The snake will eat whatever rodents it can catch and all the young and use the hole until it digests, gets hungry and moves on. The way to move it on quicker is to lay a hand on it while it is out basking, it will leave that night. BUT a rbbs will see you coming from 20-30feet so you have to be very stealthy and fast to catch it.

 

[Bluetongue1]

… The way to move it on quicker is to lay a hand on it while it is out basking, it will leave that night. …

Ah yes! The “laying of hands” technique. I have heard about that. Except I think the version I got had something to do with demons. Lol.

I'm still intrigued as to why people instantly assume this hole was made by an animal...

Mechanical subsidence, especially due to water movement in the subsoil, does not occur in vertical even tubes. It would likely produce a mass slumping of the soil in a larger area. Loss of soil beneath it is not going to produce the removal of nearly circular patches of grass and lippia. At best, the vegetation mat would be ripped apart when sodden (and therefore heavy) and unsupported.


I definitely need to buy a smaller wine glass… when posting last night I missed several pages of posts, the fact that the hole was 5 or 6cm in diameter and that there was more than one hole. DOH! On the plus side… the head wasn’t too bad.

I agree with Ron that the hole was most likely dug from underneath. There is a complete lack of any trace of subsoil around the entry. Plus, if you were excavating from the top, you would not want any bits of residual vegetation across the hole as these would serve to brush soil off each load. Given the diameter, it likely too big for a cicada but not for something like Mitchell’s Hopping Mouse. The vertical hole could go down to around a metre and will hit a horizontal branch of the burrow system. You could put a sinker on the end of a piece of string and use that to measure how deep it goes.

And as Cement indicated, that size hole, particularly where part of a larger burrow system, could definitely accommodate a reasonable size snake.

Blue

 

[cement]

When I say lay a hand, I mean grab it by the tail.

 

[Jesssie]

It was made by a Triksiest husbandius using a broomhadlius to fool you.

Ahh yes, the Triksiest Husbandius... I'm afraid Triksiest Husbandius lacks the patience and finer motor skills to dig his burrow so small and consistently, if this were a Triksiest Husbandius hole, I think it would be much wider, and finish relatively close to the surface with a lot of excavated soil evident around the opening. That being said, the Triksiest husbandius wouldn't waste its energy on a burrow it wasn't going to use, it usually prefers to bask in the sun while keeping hydrated with some form of bubbly amber liquid, or they are often found in the largest chamber of their square shaped caves coiled up on a nest of leather and cushion, hypnotized by one of the boxes of lights they all keep around their caves. A curious thing are these boxes of light, the male Triksiest husbandius has some built instinct to collect the biggest box of light of all the males in their pack. This seems to make them feel like the alpha male, although it is rarely the case.

 

[Snowman]

2 pages on a hole..... would someone just dig it up....

 

[Jesssie]

Does anyone else find it odd that this hole is smack bang in the middle of a big open patch of lawn? I have a nice concrete fence running right around the yard, save for the driveway of course. I think if I were a little burrowing critter, id dig my burrow nice and close to the for abit of shelter and to be vulnerable to predators when I'm coming or going. But I guess if it were dug from beneath the soil, it wouldn't have known where it was coming up.

 

[Jesssie]

When I say lay a hand, I mean grab it by the tail.

Cement..... I do believe id be abit to chicken go lay my hands on any part of a RBB Lmao.... Sad but true *sigh*

 

[Umbral]

Cement may also get too hot in summer for whatever it was.

 

[BrownHash]

They're obviously baby sinkholes. While not a problem on their own the parent sinkhole can be quite aggressive. I would leave it alone, as disturbing them could attract the angry parent sinkhole to the area. I've attached a photo of an adult sinkhole for identification purposes