Dear reader, it was not a log: it was a 20-foot Australian Scrub python (Simalia kinghorni), one of the largest species in the world and the largest in the country.
“I was worried about another car coming and hitting it… It was so massive, I thought it would have been tragic,” she added.
Finnerty admitted to having a “healthy fear” of snakes, telling Yahoo that her encounter allowed her to overcome her fright. Despite this, pythons are calm creatures and humans really have nothing to fear. They will hunt rodents, birds, lizards and even wallabies that they believe they can tackle.
This species is, curiously, arboreal; they also non-venomous, instead constricting its prey, crushing their diaphragm and suffocating it before dislocating its jawbones to swallow the animal whole.
They can move surprisingly quickly - especially in water - and can strike with a lot of damage thanks to their backward-facing, hypodermic needle-shaped teeth, yet humans generally only get in the way of snakes looking for food, shelter or a place to warm up during the morning hours when the animal is looking to regulate its body temperature for the day’s work ahead.
As expected, once it was ready, the snake moved on without a fuss, only causing a scare after a friend, who the Yahoo report claim “had knowledge of the area”, touched the animal, causing it to turn and threaten the women.
“Every single thing that happens, whether good or bad, we always get something from it. Even though it wasn’t something that I wanted to happen, it gave me such profound respect for snakes. It changed something in me,” Finnerty said. “I like to tell people to live fearlessly. I never say, ‘Stay safe’. And even though I didn’t know what kind of snake it was, I knew I had to follow my truth,” she concluded.