M
ick Thow would be the first to admit that he is
an excitable chap with boundless enthusiasm
for anything he does. One hot evening in March
2009 I was driving back to base after a long day in
the field when Mick rang me almost breathless with
excitement. He had just checked on his heavily-
gravid female Chappell Island Tiger Snake and
discovered that she had given birth to monsters!
Mick was trying to explain to me the dimensions of
the 22 neonates and the size of their heads. I had
been keeping Tiger Snakes much longer than he
had at this stage and was a little jaded and so I
didn’t treat his report with the gravity it deserved. I
had, after all, seen some pretty big neonates over
the years - including 13g, 300mm newborn snakes
on Chappell Island itself. Several days later I visited
Mick at his home in Ulverstone on Tasmania's north
-west coast and was
overjoyed to be able to
select some of the new
babies to rear. They
were indeed excep-
tional, with enormous
heads. In particular, I
noticed immediately
that their heads were
longer than any other
neonate Tiger Snakes I
had ever seen, and I knew that this characteristic
would facilitate a larger gape and thus allow them to
swallow much larger food items than typical Tiger
Snake neonates. This proved to be the case and
these babies went straight onto large pinky rats and
were taking fuzzy rats not long after.
where they could be placed in my outdoor enclo-
sures as quickly as possible. I was employed in a
job that kept me very busy and away from home
quite a bit, so having snakes indoors at that time
was problematic. These neonates grew so fast that I
was able to get them outdoors the following August
when they were only five months old. In hindsight, I
wish I had had the time to collect more detailed
information on the size of these snakes at birth and
their subsequent growth rates. What became clear
to me quite quickly was that these snakes repre-
sented the best chance I was going to have of ever
growing out a genuine 1830mm or 'six-foot' Tiger
Snake. The ‘six-foot’ Tiger Snake became a beast
of legend in my mind, because throughout my life I
have heard endless stories of the existence of such
creatures in the Tasmanian bush but never actually
seen one. There was
just enough evidence
to suggest to me that
they might still exist
(the odd skin, the occa-
sional grainy photo)
and of course there
were also plenty of wild
and captive-raised
snakes that got close
to the magic mark. It
seemed that lots of Tiger Snakes throughout the
Tasmanian region could grow to between 1706mm
and 1760mm (5' 6" to 5' 8") and many captive speci-
mens had. However, that last four to six inches to
get to six feet seemed like a massive hurdle. The
more I researched the maximum size of Tiger
Snakes the more I realised that 'six feet' was a
rounded up, rather meaningless figure applied willy-
nilly all over the place and really had very little solid
basis in fact. No one could present me with any
good evidence of the current existence of such
‘ Mick’s Chappell Island
Tiger Snake had given birth
to MONSTERS .’
I have previously described at length how I rear
snakes (Fearn, 2014a; Lowe and Fearn, 2015), so
will resist the temptation to go into details again
here, but my goal was to get these snakes to a size