He has spent the last year getting snakes out of bathrooms, tracking cobras in Bridgend and seeking out the big cats that – apparently – call South Wales forests home.
Now Rhys “Snake Man” Jones’ efforts to unravel the mysteries of Wales’ most exotic encounters with animals are to return to our television screens – where the mystery of the big cats could finally be answered.
The Cardiff-born answer to Steve Irwin will return to BBC Wales in Rhys To The Rescue – with his first encounter being a four-foot corn snake nestling in and around someone’s toilet in Abertridwr, near Caerphilly.
“I said, ‘Can I ask what he is doing stuck on the toilet with a snake?’ – all we knew was that his wife had seen the snake around the toilet. It was a crazy situation.
“I introduced myself as Dr Rhys Jones and said that I’d heard he had been having trouble with a snake in his bathroom – and he said, ‘oh are you Rhys To The Rescue?’ and said it was fine for us to come over.”
The night visit ended with a council worker peeling back a section of bath panel, revealing a 4ft – yet harmless – corn snake into the room, causing chaos in its wake.
That sets the scene for the second series of the show, which uncovers the bizarre to the adorable and the frightening.
Among the other animals rescued by Dr Jones in the series are three ducklings that slip through a drain in Cwmbran, a cobra that terrorises a family in Bridgend, a rescued chimpanzee and two tawny owl chicks seemingly left abandoned in a wood.
But Dr Jones – a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Cardiff University’s School of Biosciences – will tonight begin to morph from a man dedicated to unearthing snakes to stalker of elusive prowling beasts as he looks to solve the biggest mystery of all: Are there are big cats roaming the South Wales countryside?
“Probably not,” he said.
“But we seem to have a had a huge amount of sightings, so we have been tracking it for the last year and a half.
“It was just an idea I have had that we would do it properly, as scientists, and say, ‘OK, we will entertain this idea and go out and look to see what evidence we can collect to support it’.
“You cannot ever prove things will never be found, but we were looking for evidence to support that they are.
“That’s not to say that won’t change tonight.”
Dr Jones also revealed his near-sighting of a big cat while doing ecology research during work on the A470 – the supposed heartland of big cat territory in South Wales.
“I was doing ecology work around three or four years ago,” he said.
“And I was up in the middle of the night doing bat surveys, the time when you have to do it, and we heard a really strange, low, rasping growl and we had to investigate, as there have been a lot of sightings.
“But it turned out to be a rather irate deer.”
Rhys To The Rescue is shown on BBC One Wales tonight at 7.30pm.
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