Aussie farmer stunned after catching red-bellied snake stealing his fish
Wondering where all his trout had gone the South Australian farmer spotted a slithering suspect.
A South Australian farmer has finally caught on to who’s been reeling in all of his fish.
Luke Cescato says he was fixing some irrigation next to a dam on his property in the Nangkita Valley, about 66km south of Adelaide, when he got a funny feeling.
“I felt like I was being watched and I had to turn around,” he told Yahoo News Australia, “and there was a snake halfway through a trout".
In a series of photos Luke managed to snap, the red-bellied black snake can be seen chowing down on his lunch with the fish’s slippery tail hanging out of the reptile's mouth.
Frustrated farmer misses out on the catch
Luke slammed the encounter as “frustrating”.
“I stocked that dam with trout and I never seem to catch any,” he said. “I now know why”.
With the snake only two-thirds of the way through his meal, the farmer explained that he left him well alone.
“We have lots of black snakes around the property,” he said. “We leave them alone and they leave us alone. So I just finished off what I was doing and gave him some peace and quiet and then went back probably half an hour later to check, and he was gone.”
Luke added that he’d never seen a snake catch a fish before, but had seen them eat other snakes and water rats. “Redbellied black snakes are common through the Nangkita Valley because it's all wetland and all water through there,” he said.
‘The snake eats better than I do’
In sharing the photo online, Snake Catchers Adelaide said that Luke’s red-bellied black snakes are “very well fed” but “really should learn to share”.
The post has since gone viral, with hundreds of Facebook users responding to the image.
“Wow super cool,” one person wrote. “Although maybe not for the trout.”
“Yum, eats better than I do,” another person said.
While someone cried “get the shovel” others praised the farmer for leaving the snake alone. Sage advice given snakes like all wildlife are protected across Australia and usually only attack humans if threatened.
“Yay, an awesome person living with nature, if only more could do this,” one person said.
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