School mum's fright as brown snake appears on windscreen
An Adelaide mother has had a near lethal run-in when she found a brown snake on her car while picking her kids up from school.
It was during her after-school pick-up when the unwanted reptile made itself known with its body wrapped around the ute’s antenna on the roof.
Alisha Chaffey, a South Adelaide mother, became irate when the uninvited passenger revealed itself while driving her kids to swimming lessons.
"I saw this little head come down [the windscreen] and I just thought, 'What am I going to do?'" she said, reports ABC News.
"Once you're out of the township, the speed limit goes right up to 100 [kilometres per hour] and so I first thought if I can get out of town once I hit 100 [kph] it's going to go flying off."
Desperate for help, Ms Chaffey returned to the school with her 18-month-old in tow.
"I wasn't going to open any door or put my windows down or beep my horn. I didn't want to scare it," the mother explained.
"I just waved my arms frantically until someone saw me looking crazy. The teacher that saw me went and got all the other teachers."
Thankfully, the bus driver for the local school came to the rescue, using a long stick to remove the snake from the top of the ute’s windshield.
"He just kind of hooked it onto the stick and put it on the ground and then they all stomped and made a lot of noise and scared it away," she explained.
The mother says coming from living on a farm in Darwin made her less scared of the snake on her windshield, explaining seeing the pictures freaked her out more.
“With my little ones still in the car and the windows down, it could have been really, really scary.”
Ange Broadstock, the Snake Catchers Adelaide manager, told ABC News snakes are not uncommon near that area.
“In the last week or so, one of our crew had been down to Rapid Bay … and did a snake awareness session,” she said.
“They have so many snake sightings around their school.”
Snakes like the one Ms Chaffey ran into are not uncommon and should be removed with caution.