An Australian woman woke up in the middle of the night to discover a massive carpet python curled up on her.
Rachel Bloor assumed it was her dog lying on top of her when she felt something heavy on her stomach and chest. But when she rested her arm atop the covers to pet the dog, she felt something smooth shift beneath her fingers.
To her horror, it was a 2.5m reptile, which had slithered its way up to her second-storey bedroom in Brisbane, Queensland.
Ms Bloor said she immediately woke up her husband and told him to turn on the lights. “He goes, ‘Oh baby. Don’t move. There is like a 2.5m python on you,” she told the BBC.
The incident occurred on Monday night.
Her first course of action was to tell her husband to take the dogs out of the room. “I thought if my Dalmatian realised that there’s a snake there,” she said, “it is gonna be carnage.”
Once the dogs were moved out, she kept her cool and carefully crawled out from under the covers. “I sort of side shuffled out,” she said.
She maintained her composure and ushered the snake out through the window herself, without calling in professional help.
Ms Bloor suspects the carpet python, a non-venomous constrictor commonly found in Australia’s coastal areas, squeezed through the plantation shutters on her window and onto her bed and eventually “curled up on top” of her.
“It was that big that even though it had been curled up on me, part of its tail was still out the shutter,” she said.
“I grabbed him, even then he didn’t seem overly freaked out. He sort of just wobbled in my hand.”
Ms Bloor recalled she was unfazed by the snake and relieved it was not a toad. “Toads freak me out,” she said.
Kurt Whyte, a snake catcher, said snake activity had ramped up with breeding season over and eggs starting to hatch. “Obviously with this hot weather we’re seeing plenty of them getting out and about and basking in this sun,” he told ABC News.
Mr Whyte said the number of snakes had not gone up but sightings had grown more frequent as bushland gave way to new housing developments. “They have got to find places to live, and our backyards are offering the perfect habitat,” he said.
“Unfortunately, the gaps in our garage doors…provide the perfect entry points for a snake.”
