A famously snake-free country, Aotearoa and its beaches are wrangling with the sporadic arrival of yellow-bellied sea snakes
It looked like a rope or a question mark – a black scribble on the sand. The creature had washed up on a Northland beach in May and was found by a steely local 11-year-old, who popped it into a bag, took it to his local corner shop and requested a box. The purveyor told him it was a sea snake, so the boy put it in a bucket and took it home. The snake did not survive the trip.
“I didn’t know what to do with it,” the boy told the New Zealand Herald. “I chopped its head off, put it in a bag and threw it out.”