Executive recruiter Tim Berryman was at his NSW Central Tablelands property on the edge of Orange recently when his eight-year-old son came running into the house.
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"He was quite upset," recalled Mr Berryman.
"He was saying 'Dad there's a snake! Dad there's a snake!'
"He was playing outside and I think he heard some rustling."
Mr Berryman went to the rear of his house and discovered an Eastern Brown snake sunning itself in a garden bed just metres from the back step.
It was the second Eastern Brown he's seen on the property in the three years he's lived there.
"It's pretty unnverving to have a snake in your immediate vicinity, but we knew that brown snakes don't want to have any interaction and will move away."
Mr Berryman said he had "two options - destroy it myself or get in touch with Jake."
Jake, of course, is local snake wrangler Jake Hansen.
Mr Hansen came to the property and took charge of the situation.
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When approaching a snake, Mr Hansen said he takes his time, and doesn't feel a surge in adrenaline or a heightened pulse rate.
"It'll go up if I'm chasing a snake," he clarified, "but to me it's just become very normal."
Mr Hansen grabs the snake about two thirds of the way down its body before bagging it up and taking it to new pastures.
"You want to get them a bit up from the tail as it's fairly fragile, and it's where their private parts are, so they don't tend to like it."
He said the snakes will often wrap a portion of their tail around his hand "for leverage to pull up".
He has caught some 20 snakes so far this season - about seven Eastern Browns and the rest Copperheads.
A snake was spied recently near Orange Aquatic Centre, but it had removed itself from the vicinity by the time Mr Hansen had arrived.
He said that so far it had been a fairly typical season, and that he hadn't been called to deal with a snake that had sought cooler climes and entered a house.
