Snake Found In Bushes In Suburb Of Auckland

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30500, 23 July 1964, Page 1

Snake Found In Bushes In Suburb Of Auckland

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, July 22.

A dead snake 2ft 7in long was brought into the “New Zealand Herald” office tonight. It had been found in some bushes at Titirangi.

A senior lecturer in zoology at Auckland University, Miss J. Robb, who dissected the snake tonight, said it was almost certainly not a sea snake, was non-venomous, an almost mature female and had been about to shed its skin when it died.

“There is not a specimen of the snake in the university museum similar to this one,” said Miss Robb. “There isn’t much variety of snake specimens available in the country to provide a background for comparison.” This made the process of identification more difficult. A land snake could have reached the estuary area by “rafting” from Australia or the islands, although this was an unusually long distance for snakes to travel in this fashion. “About 300 miles is about the maximum distance that one would expect a snake'to raft out of tropical waters,” Miss Robb said.

Alternatively a snake could be jettisoned accidentally from a ship arriving from tropical regions. One of the main difficulties in identifying the Titirangi snake was not knowing where it had come from. Miss Robb said the snake must have been reasonably fresh when it was put into the jar of methylated spirits.

Whether the snake was a type capable of surviving New Zealand conditions was not known, but it was in a very healthy condition when it died.

There was no way of telling immediately how the snake had died and there were innumerable possible explanations for its death. The snake was found 300 yards from a tidal creek,

known as Little Muddy Creek, in some bushes on the property of Mr J. R. McPherson, Grendon road, Titirangi, by his two sons, Craig, aged 13, and Gregor, aged nine, and their one-year-old Alsatian. The creek flows from the Manukau at Laingholm. One-inch thick in the middle, the snake has a diamond-shaped python-like head with blue-grey scales, interspersed with dark green ones on its back. Underneath it is covered with dark green scales tinged with a cream-and-yellow colouring. Craig McPherson said tonight that he and his brother saw their dog sniffing in the bush. They went to investigate and found the dead snake.

They told their father of

the find and he put it in a bottle with methylated spirits to preserve it. “We kept the snake under the house for quite a while,” said Craig. “We showed it to our schoolfriends. People would not believe that we had a snake until we showed them.”