“She probably just thought it was a stick or a shadow and given that the snake’s blind in that eye, it’s obviously not seen the shadow coming towards it and given it enough time to move,” Mailey added.
Mailey explained that the season and the reptile’s physical limitations created a highly unusual situation.
“If it was any other time of year and the snake wasn’t blind, it would have had energy and seen her coming and got out of the way,” she said.
She added that such occurrences are rare but not completely unprecedented in the profession.
>>> Filming in Occupied Western Sahara Erases Sahrawi Suffering, Says Artist
“So it’s just a mixture of the time of the year, it being a blind snake, and it’s just part of life, unfortunately,” Mailey said.
Mailey consulted an experienced colleague who confirmed having encountered similar bicycle entanglements previously.
“When it did happen, I actually rang one of my close friends that’s a snake catcher.
He’s been doing it for 31 years and I explained what had happened to him and he said, ‘I’ve had this happen a couple of times,’” she said.
Mailey also noted that people regularly misidentify these highly venomous snakes with harmless local species due to color variations.
“They often get misidentified with what would be a keelback snake, which is a totally harmless, non-venomous snake,” she said.
People frequently call professional catchers during the night out of mistaken fear.
“I get a lot of calls … thinking they’ve got an eastern brown in the house at night-time … we’ll find it’s just a brown tree snake because they’ve based it on colour,” Mailey said.
