Joseph Blake changes his mind

At the beach entrance track that I use, today a Common or Eastern brown Snake (Pseudonaja textilis) slithered off to the right (south) into the grass and scrub, then as I kept walking he changed his mind and decided to cross my path again into the scrub on the left. Browns can run like the wind, but this one, while not dawdling, was not going at full speed, so I had time to observe him quite well for a few seconds both times. Poor bugger. All he wanted to do was catch a few rays on a bright and warm day at Sandy, just as I did.

At the time, I was thinking about the safety issue and not his motivation for the about-face, but I've since had a beautiful flaneur on the beach and come home for dog's eye and dead 'orse (in Aussie rhyming slang, pie with tomato sauce) and cuppa, and am a little more reflective. Not that I've figured it out.

Possibly when the Joe Blake first turned south, he might have run into a dog turd that scared him. He would have done a quick Uey (you can hear the Hanna-Barbera sound effects) as quick as he could -- I'd be much the same. Or perhaps, in his fear of me, his first reaction was to go into the nearest thicket, just as mine was to stop still; then, maybe, Joe realised that, being a better class of Reptilia, he wasn't a southsider, he was a northsider, and he'd be safer closer to the centre of his territory and not on, or beyond, its boundary.

Joe was fat and easily 1.5 metres. My first guess was that he was as long as I'm tall (183 cm) but as snakes, like fish, are always smaller than you believe, I'll estimate lower than I think he actually was. And since the books say Eastern browns only grow to a metre and a half, I'll bow to the judgement of the experts. However, the width of the path where I saw him is two metres, and his body length was almost that. It's like a "fish that got away" story, especially as brown snakes aren't common around here, but I'll go to sleep tonight happy believing that he was 160 centimetres.

Strange to say, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Wildlife Atlas of Moonee Nature Reserve doesn't list this Joe Blake. However, he was too beige-brown to be a Marsh snake (Hemiaspis signata), unless I'm very much mistaken, and he was definitely not boldly patterned like a Carpet python. I grew up in the bush with more than enough browns around my backyard, and browns are common enough outside cities on the east coast, so I well know the look of them, but this was the biggest I've seen.

So I have a few mysteries today. Another is why I hadn't noticed before this day how strewn with stones the south end of Sandy has become, for about 50 paces on the sand before the rocks. I suppose they came in with the rough weather a couple of weeks ago and only today was the tide right for me to observe them. Then again, maybe I'm just as thick as two short planks, which a lot of people think. I just hope I'm not thought to be a snake fibber.