We have been having some very hot days on the farm in the last couple of months, without the usual late afternoon/evening storm to cool everything down.  It has been effecting  everything on the farm, the plants and animals and not just the domesticated ones.

While doing the afternoon feeding, I got a bit of a fright when I went to grab my water bucket.

Snake in bucket

Just your friendly(non venomous) carpet snake or diamond python as they are sometimes called.   Obviously, the heat was having an effect on this guy too and he was looking for anyway to cool himself down, including the small amount of water in the bottom of my bucket.  Our creek is dry at the moment so he did not have any easy access to water anywhere else.

On closer inspection, not that I got too close, it looked like he had a number of ticks on him.

 

Ticks on snake

These guys  help keep the mice and rat population down in our shed, which is a good thing and they are quite docile, so without to much stress we caught him.  We were not sure if having a high tick burden can make them sick, so we pulled all the ticks off and let him go.

He happily started climbing a tree close to the shed and hopefully found somewhere nice and cool to recover.

Carpet Snake climbing a tree

Here’s hoping for some good soaking rain in the very near future!!!!

 

Tanya