lost and found success stories

This is a great thread! I haven't had an escape (yet? should I even say that? no- I'll just leave it at "haven't had an escape.") so I have no stories to share, but it is interesting to read of everyone else' s experiences with them. I like learning from other peoples mistakes for a change... it's crazy how it happens so quickly and when you really think they're secure...

This actually happened 2 weeks ago..lol. Sephiroth... my 6 foot male Burmese snuck out of his cage while we were changing his water. I looked away maybe 15-20 seconds and he was gone. Somehow he slithered past 4 people to reach the kitchen, and after 2 hours he finally cane out of hiding from behind the dryer and into the living room. He just slithered OJ in the middle and made himself at home. It happens in a. Instance, I'm just glad my dad (who was housing them for awhile) kept all his doors closed, if not we might not have ever found him!

My first escape was my male mojave. He was in a qt setup and managed to push the lid up enough to get out, I found him about 4ft away curled up under the blankets of the bed in that room.

My second was my big normal female who must have used her hide as leverage to push her tub out of the rack, she was under the dresser about 1 ft away.

My last escape was my female mojave, we have our new rack in the basement and I'm not even sure how she got out but we found her clear across the room in a paint tray. We had 4 stacked up and she was in the bottom one. Took me the longest to find her.

Oh and my nile got out of his old sliding glass enclosure before we finished his big cage. He figured out how to get his nails between the glass and slide it open. That was a fun morning. A friend was sleeping on our couch and woke up with an almost 5ft monitor on his lap!

sent from my EVO

ya my girlfriend put a heat pad, like the kind for your back on the second shelf of a small 9 tub hatchling rack i have. not sure WHY she put it there i guess it just seemed convenient (wasnt on just being stored). well a couple weeks later her back was hurting so she pulls the pad out and goes to bed. well late at night with the lights off she didnt realize the pad while being pulled out pushed open a 6qt tub. she went to work in the morning and when i woke up i saw this tub wide open. i thought CRAP guess im going on a snake hunt today. looked in the tub that had been open ALL night and my little het pied girl was sitting contently like nothing ever happened. i got lucky!

I apparently left my spider's tub open one day. I went back to the snake room about a half hour later to find him missing. I started to panic, then noticed him two shelves down huddled up in the back of the rack.

My first bp escape was this past summer. I was moving a 7 tub rack out of my room to the garage. So I take the tubs out and put a snake in an individual pillow case, one by one....then placed them back in the tubs and put the tubs in the bathroom right next to my room.
So I go on with moving the rack to the garage, cleaning up, rearranging....then I start getting the tubs and carrying them to the garage, one by one. Well, I'm at the 6th tub (almost done!). I pick it up and noticed it felt WAY too light. The pillow case SHOULD have had a 2000+ gram het pied female in it (and of course, it happened to be my favorite out of my female het pieds). So I start kinda panicing..."how the **** did she get out?!?! The knot is still tied and tight!!!" I start examining the pillow case and there was a cut flap on it!!! So I start tearing apart my bathroom, searching EVERYWHERE! I look in the hallway. My bedroom. Nothing. No sign. So I go out on my side yard and talk to my neighbors for a bit. I come back in and there she is, just calmly slithering across the bathroom floor. Ugh!! She hasn't eaten well since she got out that day :(
And then somewhat recently, my quarantine rack isn't a tight fitting one where I don't need lids. It's just a resin rack from Walmart thrown together. I didn't realize the babies I had in the 6qt tubs were strong enough to lift the lids!! I luckily caught him before he got completely out....
http://img.tapatalk.com/4ca896f6-b2e5-a493.jpg

Ahh, has happened a few times :P.

Pastel female got out once, found her 4 hours later underneath my nightstand trying to stuff herself into a paper towel roll. I woke up at 4 AM for some strange reason and noticed her gone.. I had school at 8:55 AM that day :P.

Spider got out once, my mom found him at the bottom of our stairs curled up in a ball. Tried getting out another time about a month ago but I caught him in the act :D.

Common Kingsnake male got out of his tub once (had no clips to hold the sides of the lid and tub) but found him in the hallway.

Dumeril's boa female got out once, found her curled up under a pillow in the same room. Almost got out one school morning but caught her in the act. This is when I had her in a temporary enclosure.

Bredli Carpet got out of her tank once (she's in a tub setup now) and perched up in the fake tree I have in the snake room. She even took her first meal no problem and ate it in the tree :gj:.

I think that's all. I usually keep all my enclosures secure, but I guess sometimes stuff just happens.

Somewhat ashamed to admit, I have a few "lost and found" stories to share. :oops:

When I got my first snake Delilah (normal female BP), she was living in a glass tank w/ mesh top... I put something on the lid to weigh it down, but underestimated the strength of a determined Ball Python! She escaped twice in two days, and was found quickly both times - first squished behind the desk where her tank was located, and second on top of a nearby bookshelf. That second time my roommate & I were frantically tearing apart the room, while she was looking down on us the whole time. When I finally spotted her up there, I swear she was thinking "Haha, dumb humans!" :P

Then there was the double escape of my ghost/motley corn snake, Wednesday. I'd just bought her from a Herp Expo, and put her into a 6qt Sterilite tub... failing to realize that tub had a SMALL crack, just big enough to squeeze her tiny body through. At first I thought she'd just pushed open the tub, so I added binder clips, and only discovered the crack after her second escape. Both times I found her in the same place, squeezed under my Boaphile rack across the room - warmest & darkest spot around!

Final story is of my Western Hognose Charlotte, who's probably my favorite snake in the entire collection. A friend and I were unpacking a box in my bedroom (recently moved), and I decided to let Charlotte cruise around the bed... one second she was in plain sight, then suddenly she disappeared. After searching the ENTIRE room for like 30 minutes I got frustrated, and went to sit down in the living room. A few minutes later my friend comes out holding a t-shirt, and asks "do you like this shirt?" "Ummmm, yeah. Why?" She handed it to me and I noticed it was heavy, because little Charlotte was all curled up inside. Apparently she fell asleep in a t-shirt we'd just unpacked, and my friend unknowingly put her into a drawer... boy am I glad she thought to check the dresser!

My favorite escape was my first snake year ago. She slithered off when I wasn't paying enough attention and was gone for over 6 months, we tore apart the house and did everything we could think of to find her. I put water bowls alone the walls in each room so she has water at least and I put a line of flour across each door and closet and every night we would see tracks so we knew she was alive somewhere but we could never actually find her even when we tore everything apart. One night i put a f/t mouse in a container and put a fan behind it and she came out of the closet one night my mom tried to get her and she bit her toe and ran off again lol. We tore the closet apart more time than i can count and knew she was in there but could never find her. Finally one day we looked on the very top shelf of the closet, the shelf there was no possible way she could get up to and there she was napping in the corner. Now for the last 10 years every time she gets out we just give her two hours then check the top shelves of all the closets and without fail she's always curled up in the corner of the shelf taking a nap lol. I used to have a ten foot burm that would get out to and I would always find her stretched out on the beg with her head on my pillow lol.

Almost forgot about my favorite escape of all. I had a clutch hatch this summer and one egg was trouble the whole way, the rest looked great and one turned into a pancake 2 days in and stayed like that until it hatched. I was convinced there was nothing in that one but surprise, not only was it the first egg to pip but he was out of the egg in less than an hour, popped the lid of the egg tub and gave me a heart attack until I found him roaming the incubator crammed between the water bottles lol. His name is now trouble, he's a little normal boy buy I just had to keep him after that lol, he is definitely still a trouble maker.