Hearing the noise, the man witnessed a scary scene in the tree

A Gold Coast man captured footage of a python swallowing a marsupial whole in his backyard .

Greg Hosking, from Currumbin, in Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia, filmed a python's meal and said it took nearly 45 minutes for it to eat the entire marsupial.

'It's very interesting to see this scene ,' Hosking told ABC.

The python wrapped tightly and carried the opossum up the tree.

The man told the news outlet that the animal, nicknamed "Monty," had been seen around the house before but had not been spotted in weeks. This time the birds were making noise in the yard, causing him to look up.

That's when he noticed the python at the top of the tree with its jaws wrapped around some animal. The homeowner said that the animal was hanging about 5 meters above the ground at that time.

Hosking revealed: 'We could almost touch it, we kept our distance a bit.'

Mark "The Snake Hunter" Pelley told Yahoo7 that this sighting is not uncommon.

He said: 'They can extend their jaws very wide to catch prey larger than the width of their body. Pythons have the ability to swallow their prey whole."

Carpet pythons (Morelia spilota) occur throughout Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. They are non-venomous and mainly eat small animals including frogs, lizards, birds and mammals. Adults are usually 2 - 4 m long.

Carpet pythons are adaptable and have learned to live with humans. They appear almost everywhere and are no longer strange to Australians. This is not the first time the sight of a carpet python hanging upside down to swallow a marsupial has been filmed in a residential area.

Pythons kill their prey by wrapping their bodies around the animal and squeezing it to death. They spend most of their time in trees, mainly active at night.