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Snake filmed eating snake in Ipswich

Rachel Clun
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While snakes eating wallabies seems to be the norm in far north Queensland, a snake eating another snake is a rare sighting.

But it's just what snake catchers Sally and Norman Hill saw when they were called to a job at Goodna on Monday afternoon.

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Hungry snakes eat up

A scrub python is filmed eating a wallaby in far north Queensland while an eastern brown devours a carpet python near Ipswich.

"By the time we got there the snake was still eating the carpet python. We've never seen this before ourselves," Ms Hill said.

"We hung around for a couple of hours – when you see a snake eating an animal it's interesting."

The snake doing the eating was an eastern brown, a highly venomous species that usually eats small rodents, birds and frogs.

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Ms Hill, who runs N&S; Snake Catcher Ipswich, Brisbane & Logan with her husband, said catching the brown and its prey was quite straightforward.

"We just opened the bag up and he went in there himself," she said.

It took more than three hours for the snake to eat its lengthy prey, but Ms Hill said it was easier on the snake to relocated it once it had finished its meal. 

"It's really hard because sometimes when we do travel they can regurgitate their meal, so we waited and waited and then relocated it," she said.

"It didn't spew it up which was good."

Another recent snake meal caught on camera involved a scrub python snacking on a wallaby near Cairns.

The large python and its larger dinner were spotted by Kuranda resident Bernie Worsfold in a horse paddock on Sunday afternoon.

The snake somehow managed to swallow the whole wallaby, seemingly unperturbed by a curious horse that was looking on.

Mr Worsfold said he tried to save the wallaby's joey, rescuing it from its mother's pouch, but sadly he got there "10 seconds too late" to save it.

"I got fascinated by it because I've seen bigger snakes, but this one, his head was the size of your hand," he said.

"And when he opens up, his mouth, his jaw was the size of the wallaby."

"It was most fascinating thing to see the muscle in his body suck the wallaby in, as the other part of his body was squeezing the meal."

Mr Worsfold said he estimated the python was about four metres long.

While most scrub pythons will eat birds, rats, possums and other small mammals, large ones - they can grow to seven metres - are known to eat the occasional wallaby.

Just last month, another scrub python was seen eating a smaller wallaby in the middle of a golf course fairway in Cairns.

It took the python "quite a while" to finish eating the wallaby joey, before it slunk back into the bush.

In another New Year snake incident, a woman was bitten by a wild green tree snake at Australia Zoo on Monday.

Though it didn't attempt to eat her, and the snake is non-venomous, the woman was taken to hospital as a precaution.