corvus wrote:Been talking to a Herpetologist and he said"tigers don't attack ever"...
They will I'm lead to believe. This was told to me by the wife of a friend who was confronted a Tiger Snake in the courtyard of her home. She swung a rake at it and didn't kill it. Her husband came to her defense because she was screeming. The snake then bailed him up in the corner of the courtyard for several minutes while he then fought the snake off while it repeatedly tried to attack him ... until he finally killed the snake.
I know that Eastern Browns attack. At Googong dam, an Eastern Brown Snake was lying motionless beside the road. I had stopped my 4x4 about 7-8m from the snake and waited for the snake to move. After about 10 minutes it hadn't moved, so I got out and chucked a rock near the snake. I missed the snake and the snake got showered in gravelly bits. About a foot in front of the snake a rabbit, which I hadn't seen bolted out of the grass. The snake rose-up flattened its neck and within another second it has reached my car and bit the driver's side front tire, several times. The snake traveled so quickly I nearly crapped myself. Eastern Browns have very short fuses. The snake could have been hunting for hours, I can see why it got cross. I'm glad it thought that my car had thrown the rock.
I've a friend who lives near Lake George, who's Mother Mrs B is a totally mad snake person. Mrs B ran over a snake and
killed it in their driveway and she picked the snake up and put it into her shopping bag, she was taking into the Australian National Uni to have it identified but she called into the Uni Credit Union on the way. When the shopping bag was on the counter the snake woke-up, slid out of the bag and raced across the floor of the Credit Union. The snake cleared out the Credit Union until an ACT Parks Ranger caught the snake, a Tiger Snake ... which took the ranger about 2 hours to find it hiding behind a filing cabinet. This was a big story at the Uni when I was working there in the Prehistory Department ... Prehistory which now called Archaeology, which is very close to the ANU Credit Union. We saw everyone standing out side the Credit Union, but only later did I find out what had caused the crazy event. I got big props from my colleagues for knowing Mrs B.
On another occasion the same lady Mrs B, found a dead kitten at the entrance to her barn. The mother cat and several other mature cats had a Tiger Snake bailed up against a wall inside the barn. Mrs B went and got a shotgun, came back and blew the snakes head off from point blank. Unknown to her, her son (my friend Peter) had come home into his lounge room which was on the other side of the wall. Half the barn was converted into a flat by Peter. Peter was sitting on his couch directly on the other side of the wall, when a shotgun blast ripped through the wall next to him. Peter showed me the hole in the barn wall, which was no bigger than a thumb nail and the headless Tiger Snake ... but the hole in the couch was big enough to hide a water melon.
Anyway, do you remember this old two part saying,
if you kill a snake its not really dead? ...
because snakes don't die until after sundown. Warren.