Good ways to avoid this happening are to keep your pets away from snake by keeping them inside, or by keeping the snakes away by reducing the thing attracting the snakes to stay around your home, weather it be sheltered places to hide in long grass, under tin, piles of wood, bricks.

Without places to feel secure the snake will move on. There are no guarantees when or where you might see the red belly’s mum, but you can control where you cat isnt.

Check out your yellow pages to see if there is a snake removalist nearby so you have options should another snake have you concerned. c:

You might wonder why being dependant on external temperatures could be beneficial to a reptile? Mammals like us, use a lot of energy regulating our temperatures with our our own energy, i’ve heard reptiles use 1/10th the energy we do by making use of the external warmth, part of why a large snake could go a lot longer without a meal than we can (*to be fair though, i’m sure a snake would be much happier feeding as regularly!)

There are a few exceptions i’ve heard of to reptiles needing external warmth, including sea turtles that crank out the heat and are insulated by vast amounts of blubbery goodness and in maternal incubation in some snakes that produce warmth by”shivering” while around their clutch of eggs.

If you are concerned about snakes being lured to around your hot water system, when it is out of the hiding area, if safe to do so, blocking any holes the snake was hiding in is a good start, if it is on loose earth, any tunnels would likely have been made by rodents and possibly one more reason the snake is stopping in!

The things that make a yard attractive include protective cover and food. If you’ve long grass or stacked firewood and rodents or frogs, there is a greater chance you’ll make a snake feel at home and stick around until food or shelter run out.

Another reason you might find many young red bellies, is that their mother had given recently live birth to them, resulting in several small slender red bellies being in the same spot at the same time!

Its interesting that you suspect the bluetongue for luring the snake in, scent plays an important role for snakes and goannas, their forked tongues smelling in stereo, the left and right tips to their forked tongue when flicked and returned to the special “Jacobson’s” organ on the room of their mouth, can discern the strongest scent being in either left or right, allowing them to hunt down prey. I have encountered a red belly while bushwalking that I could hear investigating a network of rodent burrows in long grass under lantana (See pic above, “looking for lunch”). Eventually, an energetic rodent bounded out and up along the firetrail I was on, the red belly had missed out this time but was pretty close, and it would have been difficult to locate by site alone.

Back onto your hunch, bluetongue skink “wee” has been used by some reptile keepers as a trick to disguise the scent of prey a snake would not normally eat. I expect it is a bit of a stretch in this case that the red belly had entered specifically for the bluetongue, there may be other reasons, including it was just too hot outside and the snake had sought shelter – i’ve relocated many snakes who’ve escaped the intense heat of a summer day in a lovely cool home or garage, one night I recall relocating a red belly at night from someones country home, as it had come in to escape intensely heavy rains that likely flooded a previous hiding place.

Pete

Pete

Regards,

Sue

I live in Central Queensland and found a dead snake on the road outside my place yesterday, it was (I think) a baby snake about a foot long with a light brown top and a pink belly, I have been trying to figure out what it could be by googling the description, but no luck. I have two little girls and two extremely dumb large dogs, so I thought I should find out whether it was poisonous.
thanks
Sheena

Red-bellied Blacks definately will eat frogs in the wild, (I can confirm this having relocated one on a rescue recently that regurgitated a half digested striped marsh frog!) I havent observed younger ones eating personally although i’m pretty sure they eat small frogs based on where i’ve seen them basking when i bushwalk – places i’ve seen and heard lots of small frogs calling.

In captivity, I have seen Red-bellied Black’s feeding on fresh killed mice (it is illegal to feed live vertebrates to your pets, it is also illegal to feed them other protected fauna including reptiles and frogs!) Snakes rely strongly on scent to discern what is food – if there was a snake being a trouble feeder, read up on scenting food items, like rubbing skink wee on a mouse, to trick a snake that eats skinks into start eating mice.

Looking up more on the diet of RBBS’s it’s recorded as “60%frogs, 31% reptiles 9%mammals” thanks to a book I recommend if you want to learn a stack more
about native snakes, “Australian Snakes – A Natural History by Rick Shine”

Red-bellieds are not a snake I would recommend as a first snake for most people. There are many captive bred pythons on the market such as Stimson’s Pythons that are established feeders (it’s illegal to collect snakes from the wild without a very different kind of permit to your reptile keepers license). A captive bred python would give you a great introduction to the hobby (I can even recommened a few python breeders if your interested).

Cheers,
Pete