Robert Irwin, the son of the late Steve Irwin, shared a video of a snake attacking him and biting him on the face, similar to his dad’s experience decades ago.
The 16-year-old shared the video on Instagram on Saturday, which shows him rescuing a carpet python before it bites him on the face.
The footage of the snake attack was captured while the Irwins were filming their series for Animal Planet, Crikey! It’s the Irwins.
“Are you going to be grumpy or are you going to be nice?” Irwin says in the video as he lifts the carpet python out of a bag.
“Aren’t they just the coolest? I love carpet pythons. That is a good size carpet python. That’s so cool. I gotta tell you, when I first found this guy…” he says as he is cut off mid-sentence by the snake when it bites him in the face.
After the snake bites Irwin the footage switches to the moment when his father, Steve, was bitten in the face by a snake while filming The Crocodile Hunter years ago.
“Wait for it. After a snake rescue with this cheeky carpet python while filming for Crikey! It’s the Irwins it brought back fun memories of a very similar situation that happened decades before in one of the original crocodile hunter documentaries!” Irwin captioned the footage. “Maybe it was her way of saying ‘thanks’ for being rescued!”
“You can see how this all unfolded on our Crikey! It’s the Irwins – Life in Lockdown special on Animal Planet this Saturday July 11 in the USA.”
He also shared side-by-side photos of him and his father after the snake attacks.
Last July, Irwin paid tribute to his late father with a touching Instagram post in which he recreated a photo of the elder Irwin feeding a crocodile.
The side-by-side photo shows Steve Irwin, above, and Robert Irwin, below, dressed in the same khaki outfit while feeding the same crocodile.
“Dad and me feeding Murray,” Robert wrote in his post. “Same place, same croc — two photos 15 years apart.”
Irwin’s late father, Steve, also known as The Crocodile Hunter, was a nature nut and an internationally known fixture on the channel. He was killed by a stingray barb through the chest in 2006 while shooting an underwater documentary film in his native Australia. The cameraman with Irwin at the time claimed the popular TV personality was stung “hundreds of times.”
—With files from Global News’ Josh Elliott