A snake and a mouse have been filmed taking refuge together in a nook of a bridge in tropical North Queensland, Australia, as the Mulgrave River's flooding waters surged around them. Local resident Simon Wood found the strange bed fellows "just chilling" in a gap between a bridge's stone blocks at around midday on Sunday when he took a walk down the street to watch the rising waters. "Me and the missus thought we'd go down and have quick sticky beak," Mr Wood said.
"I saw the snake first he was just hiding from the river. Then saw the mouse and thought 'That's his dinner source,'" he said about the unlikely friendship. "It was predator and prey - Mother Nature's got bigger plans for them but they've gotta survive together," Mr Wood said. Mr Wood said the mouse was not even frightened of the reptile that would normally make a quick meal of, acting bold enough to run back and forth over the snake's back.
The drenched, little field mouse is seen hiding out in a niche while the snake, believed to be a slaty grey snake, common to the area, sits beside it, trying to get out of the rain. "Unbelievable," Mr Wood says in the video about the little pals. "A little mouse about to walk over the snake, both shivering, and a little skink on top of his back." The Mulgrave River had flooded after a dumping of 200mm of rain around Cairns overnight, leaving around 2500 dwellings without power and countless numbers of animals and other critters without homes.
YouTube link.
"There's hell-of-a-lot of water around there," Mr Wood said about the local river had risen three metres on Sunday morning. "Every little critter is running around there - frogs jumping, lizards, insects flying and snakes getting flushed out of their holes." Though the rain had stopped, the river was still rising, Mr Wood said, coming up about an inch in the 10 to 15 minutes in which he and the wife were there.