S8 Ep369: Headline: Managing Snakes and Kangaroos During Extreme Heat Guest: Jeremy Zakis Extreme heat drives snakes into homes seeking cool air, hiding in shoes and behind furniture. Official advice for spotting dangerous snakes is to stay calm, "grab a beer," and
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Extreme heat drives snakes into homes seeking cool air, hiding in shoes and behind furniture. Official advice for spotting dangerous snakes is to stay calm, "grab a beer," and call a professional catcher. Meanwhile, kangaroos conserve energy by resting under trees on golf courses, observing humans without reacting
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is John Batchel, the Friends of Mr. Debating Society in New England, where it's very cold. |
| 0:05.8 | And my colleague and correspondent and very good friend, Jeremy Zackis, is in New South Wales, where it's very hot. |
| 0:12.1 | However, it's summertime. |
| 0:14.6 | And in summer, you have a checklist. |
| 0:17.7 | And Jeremy tells me right now the checklist includes no barbecues at the beach, no fireworks because of the threat of forest fire. |
| 0:26.6 | And one more thing. Check everything twice. Because the snakes are coming, the snakes are coming, the snakes are coming. Jeremy, I'm getting used to anticipation. The snakes |
| 0:38.3 | prefer not too cold, not too hot, just right. And one of the ways they do, they find that they |
| 0:46.0 | adjust is they don't set a temperature in their bodies. They go looking for places to sleep. |
| 0:52.1 | Now, is it too hot for the snakes to be outside? Do they come inside? Where do they go |
| 0:56.9 | when it's as hot? Honestly, John, it is absolutely too hot for snakes like humans alike, I should |
| 1:02.8 | say, as well. But the ironic thing is that the way the temperature works here is that in the |
| 1:07.5 | mornings, it's relatively cool. So it's kind of in the optimal temperature of where the snakes like to move around. |
| 1:12.9 | But as the day gets warmer, so around about 11 o'clock in the morning, that's when it crosses the peak period where the snakes start to find it getting a little bit too hot. |
| 1:21.3 | And that is when it becomes dangerous because, as you mentioned, the snakes need to regulate their temperatures. |
| 1:26.2 | And the way they do that is they find hiding spaces to either sleep or just protect themselves |
| 1:31.2 | from the direct sunlight and the direct heat. |
| 1:33.5 | And nine times out of ten, a lot of those spaces, guess what, are around the home. |
| 1:37.7 | So what the snakes do is they actually use all their sensors to identify where cool air |
| 1:43.4 | is coming from or where shade could be found. |
| 1:45.6 | So what snakes find is that there is these cool streams going through the warm air basically |
| 1:51.0 | outside and they'll make a beeline to it. |
| 1:53.8 | If it's a household where there's some air conditioning leaking out of the door, guess what? |
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