Canadian travellers have to contend with snow, Australia has… reptiles. An Aussie domestic flight was delayed recently for two hours after a stowaway snake was found in the plane’s cargo hold as passengers were boarding a Virgin Australia flight at Melbourne Airport bound for Brisbane.
The snake turned out to be a harmless 60-cm green tree snake, but snake catcher Mark Pelley said he thought it could be venomous when he approached it in the darkened hold.
“It wasn’t until after I caught the snake that I realized that it wasn’t venomous. Until that point, it looked very dangerous to me,” Pelley said.
Most of the world’s most venomous snakes are native to Australia.
When Pelley entered the cargo hold, the snake was half hidden behind a panel and could have disappeared deeper into the plane, which would required an evacuation of passengers.
“I said to them if I don’t get this in one shot, it’s going to sneak through the panels and you’re going to have to evacuate the plane because at that stage I did not know what kind of snake it was,” Pelley said.
“But thankfully, I got it on the first try and captured it,” Pelley added. “If I didn’t get it that first time, the engineers and I would be pulling apart a (Boeing) 737 looking for a snake still right now.”
An airline official said the flight was delayed around two hours.
Because the snake is native to the Brisbane region, Pelley suspects it came aboard inside a passenger’s luggage and escaped during the two-hour flight from Brisbane to Melbourne. For quarantine reasons, it can’t be returned to the wild.
The snake, which is a protected species, has been given to a Melbourne veterinarian to find a home with a licensed snake keeper.
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