lost and found success stories

I'm pretty sure most of us from the experienced breeder to your everyday hobbyist/collector have had a bp or 2 gone missing. Wanted to hear your war stories and how they escaped and when/where they were found so we can learn to prevent this from happening.
My adult normal got out while I was cleaning his enclosure. For over 2 weeks I placed a f/t rat in the middle of the room at night and sat and wait. He finally slithered out from under an entertainment system. Most recently, my baby lesser got out after my 9 yr old son didn't secure his lid. I really thought he was a goner because he was so young. Well, 2 weeks later I came home from work and found him by the garage entry door. Amazing how they pop up when you least expect them to. Good thing I found him before my better half did.

I had a hatchling corn snake disappeared during cage cleaning last week. As I was searching I spotted wormlike movement in my retic's cage. Sure enough, there she was. Eagerly exploring this new vast cage while Apollo, my tiger retic, completely ignored her. I got lucky.

I got a call from my sister "my parents wont let me keep it at my house :D" and she said "Get your butt over here, your snake is out." So I get dressed really quick and driver over there so about 5 minutes has lapsed. I get in the house and asked her where it was and she replied "I dont know?" I said "You didn't watch him?!" So I spend about 3 hours turning over every box in the house. I finally went to work and then came back at lunch with a nice live mouse and baby powder. I put the mouse in a tanki in the middle of the room and decided to put baby powder along all the doorways so I could see if he was moving...the LAST doorway left was the bathroom and after I had covered it in powder, I looked up to see Julius just laying in the bathroom floor. I was excited and frustrated at the same time becasue I then had to clean up all that powder for nothing!

2 weeks ago my female spider got out when I left the door open after changing the water dish.

I didnt realize the door was open until the next day.

She was found in the closet, on the top shelf actually. I thought that was strange that she climbed up the vacumn, the hangers and onto the top shelf.

I would have never looked on the shelf if it was not for the things I had noticed she knocked off the shelf.

a few of mine from my younger days.
i was about 11 and caught 5 garter snakes. my mom said i had to take them and let them go outside. well i snuck upstairs and put them in my dresser. a couple hours later went to check on them and they were all gone...surprise surprise...lol
spent hours pulling my room apart with my mom, step dad and neighbor. found all 5 and let them go out back.

as an older but non experienced keeper i had a baby corn escape. searched for a solid week straight with no luck. then a month later my wife starts doing dishes then screams. she had grabbed a wash cloth and started scrubbing a pan when all of a sudden the wash cloth started moving in her hand. the snake was in the wash cloth un-harmed and bigger than when he escaped.

then not too long ago i had accidentally left a hatchling ball tub open. came home and started searching all over. found snake across the room 5 tubs up in a adult rack behind a tub on the heat strip.

thankfully its been years (except for the hatchling ball) since i have had any housing problems where snakes actually escaped and disappeared
adam jeffery

My butter was the first to escape and she got out because there was too much of a gap between her tub and the rack. I spent an entire week looking for her, staying up late, leaving rat pups out and searching every where. Just as I was giving up hope on finding her relatively quickly I happened to hear some noise coming from under my kitchen sink. She had gotten stuck in a stick mouse trap my apartment complex puts down every year. It was pretty horrifying to find her like that. Half her face of was stuck to it and her mouth was stuck open. I got her off with a little cooking oil and put a lid on her tub. She's been doing fine.

My second escape was my cinny. She got the lid off her tub and managed to escape. Since she's in my QT room I only check on them every few days so I had no idea how long she had been missing. I noticed she was missing as I was feeding. I decided to ignore the fact that she was missing and continue feeding everyone first. No sense panicking when she could have been missing for days already. Turns out that was a good move because I found her under the rack. She was directly under the last snake I went to feed. :)

I plan on building/buying (haven't decided which yet) new racks early next year so hopefully I won't have any more escapes. :P

http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...day.&p=1694420
There is my story... LOL




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I had a baby KSB get out when i moved her to a 6qt tub. I guess the holes i drilled in it were just slightly too big. She had not been eating and i was going to be bringing her to a friend to see if she could help. Went to get the snake and she was gone! i looked everywhere. I even layed down some not so sticky tape to see if i could catcher her leaving the closet i built my rack into. nothing.... 2 weeks later my girlfriend was doing laundry in the basement and she stepped JUST right and between her toes were a little warm, put the laundry basket down and there she was. about 4" long and she made it all the way through the house down a set of stairs and into a room that has a boxer/pit mix in it and survived. After i got her set back up in a tub i got a good look at her and she had lost a TON of weight. I grabbed a live mouse pink and put it in the next day and she ate it! I think being out on her own scared some sense into her. She hasn't missed a meal since!

I try to take every precaution to secure my animals and clean with my g/f so we have two sets of eyes on everything. In the cold winters i have my outdoor cat inside. He WILL attack a small snake so i would be afraid of anything getting out.. (he already tries to get my sun conure Webster)

Meatball got out of his tub once. I tore my entire house apart looking for him and could not find him anywhere. Finally, we found him inside of the wall where he had crawled through a hole that should have been covered by a wall plug in unit, but was not. In fact, I still don't know why the plug in thing wasn't on the wall. Anyway, the hole was just big enough for my hand to fit in and I tried to grab him but fighting a 4 lb muscle with only your hand is nearly impossible! He managed to find another hole inside of the hole he was already in and went inside of that. I had to all kinds of mirroring and flashlighting to find out where he had gone. When I realized he went into a smaller hole and there was no way to get him from where I was, I started drilling into the other side of the wall. That scared him back into the original space and I stuck my hand back in the hole to grab him and sure enough, he found ANOTHER hole opposite of the second of that he had crawled into and crawled into that one. From there, he went into a FOURTH hole inside of the wall. I ended up drilling 5 holes in the wall until I finally found him. Inside the wall, inside of a hole inside of the wall, inside of another hole, which was behind the closet of a completely different room from where he escaped.

Here's the thread:

http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...t-of-a-problem....

Great war stories. Getting a wealth of info on what to do/not do when dealing with our bps,:snake:

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.

When I first got my 2 balls I was cleaning the tanks and somehow forgot to put the top on one of the tanks, came into my room sometime later and about had a heart attack when I saw the screen top off. It took only seconds to find my little normal girl crawling around a shelf behind her tank. I was lucky.

The second and last escape was my 1800 gram male. This was when I was living with a friend but my snakes were still home, my younger sister would water them and watch the temps for me and I would come home once a week to feed/clean.
I guess my youngest sister forgot to put his screen top back on and he got out. My other sister called me FLIPPING out "One of your snakes is out!" after her trying to talk me into driving the 30 minutes home, I finally talked her into picking him up and putting him back. That's a day she will never forget xD Gave me and my friend a good laugh too (she heard the entire phone convo)