This beautiful snake is a CENTRALIAN PYTHON (also known as BREDL’S PYTHON or the CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN CARPET PYTHON) and in the wild is found in the dry southern part of Australia’s Northern Territory, around the area of Alice Springs, where they spend much of their time in trees.

Like all my snakes this individual was bred in captivity and he hatched in 2005. He was previously owned by my good friend and TV presenter Nick Baker and he is named Irwin, in honour of the late Australian naturalist and TV presenter Steve Irwin.

As you can hopefully see from these pictures Irwin has an exquisitely beautiful pattern, made up mainly of brown/orange, cream and black scales. The centralian python is one of many Australian species known as carpet pythons (and the most attractive species of these in my opinion), due to their skin resembling beautiful oriental rugs and carpets as you can see here!

In the picture below you can clearly see a series of holes or ‘pits’ below Irwin’s mouth. These are very special heat-sensing pits which the majority of pythons have and which are used to literally detect the heat (or infrared thermal radiation) of their surroundings. If a rodent or other warm-blooded prey item comes close to them whilst they are hunting, a python can detect with incredible accuracy the warmest parts of the body to strike at!