I'm John Batchett with my colleague and friend Jeremy Zuckus in New South Wales on a Sunday morning

and the weather has turned unpredictable. It's been that way for some time now.

Autumn is coming on as if it's summertime.

The snakes, however, the snakes, what are they doing?

All this rain.

It's good for them, isn't it?

Well, the heat's not good for them.

The rain's okay.

And this is quite striking striking I don't know why we haven't

seen it before but it's called a ball of snakes what am I looking at Jeremy well

John you are looking at exactly as you described it. It is literally a ball of snakes and these are a ball of carpet pythons that are in the southern shire here in New South Wales. In fact, southern Shire is just on the southern part of

Sydney and what you're actually looking at is apparently a Python mating ritual and

what happens is that effectively there's a female Python there in many male suitors and basically there's a competition that win the best suitor

effectively to impregnate the female and then have the little snakelings.

But what is actually happening here in this photo John is that the ball of snakes

that started off on the top of a beach cliff.

And so the way the story manifests it was basically there were people out at Southern Shire's famous beaches

they're enjoying the day when they heard a rustling in the beach sand and

in the in the shrubbery they didn't think much of it until suddenly somebody

said oh my goodness it looks like the cliffs kind of collapse.

Of course, everybody grabs out their phones and starts videotaping to sort of watch this cliff collapse,

which was basically on a walkway there.

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