Watch your step.............or, don't bother.

Trip 17: Perth to Dunsborough to Ravensthorpe

Purpose: Level 1 Fauna Assessment Survey

Total Distance Traveled: 685 km

Distance Traveled Year to Date: 61, 176 km

 

The Western Tiger Snake is not a hard snake to spot in the grass.

 

Texting whilst walking reduces your peripheral vision down to less than a tenth of your normal field of view. That means that if you are texting and walking you are not only presenting a danger to any poor sod you are likely to smash into, but you are also putting yourself in danger with a very real chance that you might just walk under a bus one day. Some municipalities are contemplating marking the pavement of city streets with valuable consumer advice, such as STOP, rather than wasting energy erecting sign posts. The simple reason for this is that nobody looks up from their phone any more. That is a little scary to consider that it has come to that; a pedestrian beacon set into the sidewalk rather than up on a pole as they have been for a millennium. 

Whatever the case, if you are looking at the ground you should see what is on the ground; that much is obvious. Or is it? I believe we see what we want to see and subliminally ignore what we don’t. Moreover, we notice what our brains are trained to see and recognise immediately. The best example for me is, of course, a snake in the grass. I am a herpetologist: I am trained to spot cryptic animals at a distance. But I just cannot come to terms with how some people miss the obvious. You may know it as tunnel vision but I know it as ‘botany vision’ and the victims are, predominantly, botanists. 

I was out with one just recently at a tiny little project area which comprised a corridor of native vegetation along a small river. After no more than 5 hours field work over an area no bigger than 500 x 100 m I questioned said botanist on the number of snakes she had encountered during her day. Her answer? None. We had found six. Yes: 6. Four tiger snakes and two dugites. 

The only reasonable explanation for this observatory abstraction is optical illusion. Convince yourself you are not going to encounter a snake and guess what? You don’t. Or you did but you didn’t see it.

No bigger than a suburban playing field. Six venomous snakes in less than 5 hours.