A three-year-old Australian boy is lucky to be alive after his egg collection hatched into a mass of poisonous snakes .
The incident happened a few weeks ago when the boy, Kyle Cummings, found a clutch of nine eggs on the outskirts of Townsville, Queensland.
The boy had no idea what kind of eggs they were but wanted to keep them because he is a nature enthusiast. Fox News reports that, little did he know, the snakes were actually eastern brown’s, Australia’s most venomous species aside from the inland Taipan.
The Australian boy placed the eggs in a plastic takeout food containers and stowed them away in his bedroom closet. His mother, Donna Sim, discovered the container on Monday and, to her shock, there were seven snakes slithering around inside. Sim stated:
“I was pretty shocked, particularly because I don’t like snakes.”
Sim contacted reptile specialist Trish Prendergast about the snakes. Prendergast, the Townsville-based reptile coordinator for volunteer group North Queensland Wildlife Care, took the container on Tuesday and released the baby snakes back into the wild, according to ABC News .
Prendergast noted that the young boy was lucky he did not handle the snakes. She stated:
“Their fangs are only a few millimeters long at that age, so they probably wouldn’t break the skin, but they’re just as venomous as full-grown snakes. If venom had got on Kyle’s skin where there was a cut or if he put it in his mouth, it could have been fatal.”
Eastern brown snakes usually stay close to their nest when they are incubating eggs, but they occasionally leave for a short period of time. The young Australian boy is very lucky he didn’t encounter the mother snake while he was taking her eggs. Prendergast added that the baby snakes that hatched in the three-year-old’s closet were five to six inches long and were probably around five days old. They were thirsty but otherwise healthy.
[Image from ShutterStock ]
