intact. I was able to measure it while it was still limp,
and thus a very accurate relaxed length of 1810mm
was recorded. This perfect example of a male Tiger
Snake wasn’t quite six feet, but just an inch or so
under. However, it was obvious to me immediately
that this was no old snake; its overall build and very
low number of rodent bite scars indicated that it still
had some growing to do. It was then that I knew for
certain that such creatures did exist: albeit that they
were apparently very rare. In a previous work I
documented credible historical evidence of giant
Tiger Snakes in excess of 1830mm in Tasmania
during the rabbit plague era prior to 1954 (Fearn,
2014b and 2015). The Chilcott tiger showed me that
those genes still exist today - even if the millions of
juvenile rabbits do not. A couple of years ago I
looked Dennis up and he still vividly remembered
his big Tiger Snake and admitted that with the
wisdom of passing years he would not kill a snake
like that today.
My next foray with really big Tiger Snakes was on
Chappell Island in the Furneaux Group, but even
there genuine six-footers are hard to come by.
Recently I amused myself by getting out all my
relevant books and magazine articles and playing
'spot the six-foot Chappell Island Tiger Snake'. It’s a
game the whole family can play, but sadly no one
wins! There are lots of pictures of men of relatively
.Above left: one of my 12-year-old, captive-bred Chappell
Island Tiger snakes. This specimen is 1725mm long and
weighs 2.9kg. It’s growing in length very slowly now and
has commenced 'blocking out'. Because it is kept out-
doors it has good muscle tone and is a very powerful
snake. Photo: David Maynard.
Above right: the giant’s father. A lovely tiger from Boat
Harbour in north-west Tasmania. Photo: Mick Thow.
short stature holding large snakes, but none of them
are clear six-footers and the vast majority obviously
much less. There was a lot of rounding up to the
nearest foot going on back in the day and claims of
seven and eight feet snakes cannot be taken
seriously without good corroborative evidence. I
then had a look at the hundreds of images I have
collected from the Terry Schwaner research era on
Chappell Island between 1988 and 1993. There are
heaps of big fat snakes in the 1760mm size range
being held triumphantly aloft, but maybe two that
would go six-feet and only one animal that just
exceeded that length. All these animals (around
1500!) were very accurately measured, but sadly
Terry never published much of the data that was
collected. I have been to Chappell Island for
extended periods on multiple occasions and caught
hundreds of snakes there. While it is true that on