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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

As an entirely irrelevant aside:

There's a Youtube channel from Australia I watch of a guy who does heavy machining and welding in service of construction equipment. In the most recent episode (working on the boom of a crane) at one point a cute little brown snake crawls out from some metal and aggressively chases him, eventually crawling under another pile.

He calmly tells us this thing (an eastern brown snake) is the second most venomous snake species in the world, and he wonders if the much bigger mother is around somewhere.

This felt like peak Australia to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DalniFq6WHI (around 29:50)

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> and aggressively chases him

It's definitely not aggressively chasing him. Snakes are way less aggressive than the average person realizes. The problem is that we are huge to snakes. So while we're thinking, "Oh, shit! This snakes is chasing me!" The snake is thinking, "I gotta hide! Quick to these two big rocks right near me. Wait! The rocks keep lifting and moving away! I gotta get to them!"

90% of the time when someone thinks they're being chased by a snake, it's either:

1. You are between the snake and where it knows shelter is (water, cover, hole, etc.).

2. There is no visible shelter nearby and the snake thinks your legs are a place to hide.

I've spent a lot more time around snakes than most, including many venomous ones in the wild, and I've never been "chased". Snakes are small animals with very limited energy budgets. To them, you are a giant monster running on high octane fuel. All they want is to get away from you as easily as possible so they can go back to running in low power mode until prey comes along. They don't have the inclination or energy to tussle with you.

Had a brown snake cross my front yard just last week. First one I've seen on my property in the nearly-20 years I've been there, and only the second live, wild snake I've seen in my life.

Neighbours apparently see them fairly regularly.

Brown snakes generally move in the opposite direction to "where there are people", so despite being highly dangerous, paths don't cross closely unless quite unlucky (for either human or snake).

Ah good ol' Curtis! Definitely a good watch if you like watching engineering with large machines (and Homeless!).

I believe it's Kurtis with a "K".

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