Couple's 'surprisingly rare' 2kg find hidden inside 4WD: 'Biggest I've seen'

Footage has captured the moment a very nervous snake catcher tried to remove the furious king brown from a 4WD.

Snake catcher Max is seen nervously working to remove the mulga snake from the 4WD.
Footage has captured the moment sake catcher Max nervously tried to remove a furious hitchhiker from a couple's 4WD. Source: Snake Catchers Adelaide

A snake catcher was shaking in his boots this week after a travelling couple made a “surprisingly rare” find tucked inside their 4WD’s engine bay. The unwanted visitor made his appearance not long after the pair stopped to camp in bushland in Renmark, three hours northeast of Adelaide.

“I think they came from the north,” Peter Anderson with Snake Catchers Adelaide told Yahoo News Australia on Thursday. “Maybe they parked somewhere and it just crawled up into the car and then decided to get down again after a long travel.”

The couple assumed their “solid” 2kg hitchhiker was a python given its size, but it turned out to be a “beast” of a mallee form mulga”, Snake Catchers Adelaide posted on Facebook alongside a video of employee Max nervously trying to wrestle the reptile, also known as a king brown, out of the car.

The clip has racked up almost 50,000 views in just a day, largely due to the snake catcher’s honest and explicit reaction to the creature’s angry movements.

“F**kin’ hell … look at the size of this thing,” he says, prompting the couple to laugh.

“F**k me… holy Jesus Christ. Sorry, it’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen. What the f**k… sorry, I keep swearing.”

Luckily, the snake didn’t receive any injuries during its journey and was later released back into the wild.

“These snakes can be surprisingly rare across a lot of their range, especially as you get close to the agricultural areas around the Murray River, so it’s awesome to see a big individual like this kicking around,” Snake Catchers Adelaide explained online.

Anderson told Yahoo News the mulga was about 2.1m long and shouldn’t really have been in the area. The biggest ever recorded was 3.3m near Darwin. Mulgas — Australia’s largest venomous snakes — can be found across the majority of the continent but prefer “arid areas where it’s dry and hot”.

“Mulga snakes don’t usually come down that far,” Anderson said. “It’s not dry enough.”

Max holding the 2.1m mulga snake in the air after removing it from the 4WD.
Experts say it is unusual for a mulga snake to be found so far south. Source: Snake Catchers Adelaide

Aussies have shared their astonishment over the “massive” stowaway, with many saying Max was more composed than they ever would have been.

“Let’s be honest here for a second, I think he underplayed the use of swear words for that big angry bugger,” one man laughed.

“Some swear words??? If I had been there the swear words would have been drowned out by my screaming and the thunder of my boots as I ran away,” another joked.

“I didn’t think we had them in SA,” one stunned woman commented, while others said the couple were “lucky” they spotted it.

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