Possums in your roof are bad enough, but what about fighting snakes?
That's what Cairns snake catcher David Walton was confronted with when called to a house in the city's northern beaches on Wednesday.
"The residents rang me with suspicions they might have snakes," he said.
"I climbed up through a man hole and into the roof space, and saw two scrub pythons brawling away."
The fighting pythons were four and four-and-a-half metres long, with another two shorter snakes watching on.
Mr Walton said scrub (amtheystine) pythons commonly hide in roofs during the cooler months, and as it warms up males can get aggressive with each other for breeding rights.
"That can mean two snakes all twisted together, raising up and trying to push each other to the ground in a show of strength," he said.
"When it's fairly equal it's not uncommon for them to bite into the backs of each other's necks, it can become quite a bloody exercise."
Mr Walton said luckily the snakes were too busy with each other to notice him sneak up to catch and bag them.
They were later relocated to bushland away from residences, but not before Mr Walton snapped some pictures of the 12 to 14 kilogram reptiles.
But the 14-year snake catching veteran said that wasn't something beginners should do.
"You wouldn't just pick one of those snakes up and hold it the way I am in the pictures – you'd get hammered," he said.
"Big ones like that will latch on like a pitbull and won't let go. Those snakes have got heads on them the size of your hand, with about 160 hook-shaped teeth in there.
"They will put lots of holes into you, and pythons have an anti-coagulant in their saliva and that tends to make you bleed more."
Mr Walton said there was a special trick snake catchers used if they copped a bite.
"When we take a bite like that we use a credit card to jam underneath its mouth to get its teeth out of you," he said.
"When it bites you, you reach for your Visa card, and that's not to offer him a bribe."