SHAH ALAM: It was just another day at work for Fire and Rescue officer Radziah Osman when she took a distress call from someone who had discovered a snake.
As usual, she put on her operation gear and got into the fire engine with five personnel from the Shah Alam Fire and Rescue Station.
Upon arriving at the scene, which was located along one of the main roads in Section 20, she noticed something wiggling at the end of a concrete pipe.
"It was not the usual scene that I or the team had expected.
"I was expecting to see just one snake, but we were shocked to witness many pythons trying to wriggle out of the pipe.
"It seemed like a nest of pythons, although at first, we could not see the mother snake, who was hidden deep inside," she said.
The 54-year-old said she and the team sized up the place immediately put on their safety gloves and began snaring one snake after another from the drain.
"The baby reticulated pythons looked as if they had just hatched and were about to venture out into the nearby bushes.
"They were all wiggling one on top of the other as we tried to snare them and the count just kept going up. The final count stopped at 29.
"The babies measured about one metre long and the mother snake measured slightly longer than two metres," she said, describing it as the most number of snakes she had encountered in her 31 years of service.
When asked how she felt throughout the hour-long operation, Radziah said she had the occasional goosebumps and felt some aversion to seeing so many snakes together in the drain.
"Actually it is not the first time we have captured snakes, although, in terms of numbers, this is the most number of snakes we have caught thus far, here.
"Last year we received a similar distress call at around the same place but that was 26 snakes in total," she added.
Radziah, when asked if she was afraid of her wildlife encounters throughout her career, she said she had received adequate training and had gotten used to it over the years.
Earlier it was reported that the Fire Department had captured 29 pythons in a drain located near a restaurant in Section 20 here.
The snakes are listed as protected animals under the Wildlife and National Parks Department (Perhilitan) Wildlife Conservation Act 2010.