A five-year-old boy has survived being bitten, constricted and knocked into a swimming pool by a huge python. The snake was the length of a small car. His father told reporters: "Aw look, it's where we live. It's Australia!"
Five-year-old Beau Blake was playing by the edge of a swimming pool in Byron Bay, a small town on the east coast of Australia. Suddenly, a three-metre-long python burst out from nearby bushes.
"I believe the python was sort of sitting there waiting for a victim to come along – a bird or something – and Beau was it," his father Ben Blake says.
The python bit Beau, plunged them both into the pool, and coiled itself around one of the boy's legs.
Beau's 76-year-old grandfather leapt to the rescue, diving into the pool and lifting the boy out. The snake was still gripping Beau's leg.
Ben Blake then prised the snake loose and tried to calm everyone down.
"I'm not a little guy, I'm quite strong. I had Beau released within 15-20 seconds," he told a radio station.
"Beau was very brave," he says.
"Once we cleaned up the blood and told him he wasn't going to die because it wasn't a venomous snake, he was actually pretty good," his dad says.
Pythons are not venomous, but Beau is being treated in hospital to prevent the bite from becoming infected. He is now recovering well.
Ben Blake says the event was "something of an ordeal". He says that snakes are a fact of life in and around the subtropical Byron Bay – a popular tourist town and surfing beach up the coast from Sydney.
"It is Australia. Snakes are around," he says, adding that the snake was released. "The naughty thing went straight back into the jungle!"
Five things to know about
1. Pythons are a kind of snake. They are reptiles. This means that they are covered in scales, they hatch from eggs, and most importantly, they are cold-blooded.
2. This means that they cannot control their body temperature, and they must rely on their environment to heat up or cool down.
3. Pythons are not venomous. They do not use venom to poison their prey. Instead, they belong to the group of snakes called constrictors.
4. These snakes hold onto their prey and coil around them, slowly squeezing the air out of them until they die.
5. Pythons live in Africa, Asia and Australia. A species called the Burmese python lives in Hong Kong.
