Bindi Irwin’s Daughter Grace Had the Sweetest Reaction To Meeting a Snake in the Wild

Spotting a snake while on an outdoor stroll probably elicits a few shrieks from most people (it does for me at least), but not for Grace Warrior. Bindi Irwin’s 3-year-old daughter had a super sweet reaction to a wild snake, and it proves how fearless she really is!

The Australia Zoo CEO shared an adorable new video of her daughter while on a night-time walk. “Grace, what did we find?” Bindi asks her daughter in the clip on Instagram.

“A snake!” she responds.

“Do you know what kind it is?” Bindi asks.

“Pat her back?” Grace asks in the cutest voice. Her mom explains, “He’s a little carpet python. We can’t pat her back because she’s a wild one, but Dada’s gonna go get a snake bag so we can move her.”

In the clip, Bindi pans the camera to show the huge python on the ground right in front of them. My kids scream when they spot crane flies in the house, so seeing Grace’s calm reaction to this snake is amazing. And the fact that her first instinct is to pet the snake would make her grandpa, the late Steve Irwin, so proud!

Later, Bindi’s husband Chandler Powell shows up with a snake bag. Bindi asks her daughter what she named the snake, and Grace replied, “Lionel.”  

“A little bit active and get energy out, and then she’ll go in the bag,” Powell explains. As he slowly lures the python into the bag, Bindi and Grace sit nearby on a bench and calmly cheer for him.

“Lionel is going to go to a safe place to live,” Bindi explains. In the morning, Bindi releases Lionel into the bushland behind the zoo. She recapped the whole experience in her caption: “Meet ‘Lionel’!” she wrote. “We went spotlighting for bugs this evening (Grace’s new favourite activity) and came across this sweet carpet python on the path.”

 We don’t want the wild carpet pythons to live near the roads @australiazoo, so thankfully Chandler got a snake bag and we were able to relocate Lionel to the bushland the next morning,” she added. “It’s always nice to teach Grace snake safety and encourage her love for these sweethearts at a safe distance.”

Powell commented, “Lionel was such a special experience????”

“Average human: Snake? Run!” one person commented. “Human w/ Irwin DNA: Snake? Can I pet it? ????” So true!

Someone else commented, “Love how she already knows to ask if she can ‘pat her back’ before trying to. Very important when you live at a zoo.” Another wrote, “Lionel. That’s so adorable, Gracie is having the best upbringing learning to respect, not fear, wild animals. ❤️????????”

In a Sept. 2023 interview with SheKnows, Bindi opened up about her parents Steve Irwin and Terri Irwin taught her to be safe around wild animals at the zoo when she was a kid.

“When I was little, when my parents were working with venomous snakes, they wanted to make sure that it was completely safe,” Bindi told us. “But when you’re three or four years old, you can’t really understand the concept of ‘venomous.’ So my mum and dad would say to me, they’d go, ‘Bindi, this snake is hot, so you can’t come near it.’”

“As a little child, I understand the concept of hot — can’t touch that because it’s hot,” she continued. “So that was something that my parents said to me that I started using as a parent myself. ‘We have to be careful because this animal is a little hot. So we can’t go near it, we can’t touch it.’ I love those little educational tools to build an understanding.”

We love seeing how Bindi passes on the knowledge of animal safety and respect to her daughter!