How Did It Happen?

[Lusiphera]

One day I came home from picking my daughter up from school. She jumped out of the car before I did and headed inside. Then I heard her scream. I jumped out and ran around the car and saw my daughter hysterically crying pointing at this terrifying creature.



This was only our second encounter with snakes in this home. The first was a couple years ago when my daughter was six she told me a big black snake jumped out of our tree and I didn’t believe her. I then went to check the mail and found a big foot black snake wrapped around my mailbox. It was beautiful and I wish I could stumble across one today!



Anyway, we found this little guy in our driveway. At first we thought it was a baby before realizing it was a full grown Dekays. We admired it and then let it be. I checked on it every few hours, I could see it out my bedroom window, and realized it wasn’t moving. This was December in Baltimore so it was freezing. I worried about him but having no experience with snakes I just left him be. Two days later he had moved to about a foot under my car and I needed to leave and didn’t want to run him over. My fiancé moved him and we saw he was limp, freezing, just barely alive. I decided that I couldn’t let him die. We brought him inside with the intention of warming him up, feeding him and releasing. So a few days later when he was up and moving we tried to release him. He wouldn’t even crawl out of his tub. When we placed him on the ground he tried to crawl back in to the tub. So we found an area with some leaf litter and left him.

I worried about him all night. I couldn’t sleep. I went out at six am and found him almost dead again. I decided that was it. He was coming inside and living with me! That little guy became the best pet I ever had. He would curl up in my shirt or hand, watch tv with me, climb his little trees in his enclosure and smashed slugs and worms. I completely fell in love. We named him Tandy, if anyone gets the show reference we’re best friends, and he was always in my hand. Or bra. Of on the rare occasion I handed him over, in my fiancé’s hands.









Tandy lived several months before one day he died. He went from climbing his trees to dead in my hands in ten minutes. It was shocking and I was devastated. But Tandy had introduced me to the world of snakes and I was hooked. Flash forward to now, my fiancé and I run a ball python rescue. We have two sand boas, a hognose, two created geckos, a leopard gecko and four ball pythons. This is a small load for us as we just had a couple ball pythons adopted.

These animals are my heart. It took me thirty years to find that thing I was passionate about, that I woke up every day and could not get to work. Today we’ve rescued animals from all over our area and within a few states. We have a feeder source and a snake relocating business on the side. Many people in our area were trapping and killing snakes. We offer to come out and find and relocate them for free. Even the people who absolutely hate snakes and would gladly have them killed prefer a free removal over paying to kill them. We’ve taken in snakes with stuck shed so bad they were mostly blind, tails being cut off and covered in scale rot. Snakes badly burned by heat rocks. Snakes so starved they were on the verge of death and more. There is nothing more satisfying than bringing them back.

One of my favorites was a two year old normal we named Brooksie. She’s the one who came to us almost blind with severe stuck shed cutting into the tip of her tail and scale rot. She hadn’t been touched for twenty months. She hissed anytime you got near her and hid all the time and just hated everything. After a healthy shed cleared away those eye caps and scale rot she totally changed. She would lay on top of her hide and just watch everything. I imagine because now she could see! I took her outside for the first time in her life and at first she was scared but then she loved lying in the warm grass. She was just adopted and seeing this little ten year old girls eyes just light up when she saw her.... it was amazing.





My current pet project is this beautiful boy. He was abused, mistreated, starved, kept in a tub with no food, water, heat. A girl three hours away rescued him and when she realized he had bad wobble and was constantly false striking she knew she couldn’t dedicate the time to him he needed so she contacted us. He’s terrified all the time but every night I work with him he’s gotten better and better. He’s an absolute doll when he relaxes. Even my mother who hates snakes adores him! That’s her in the pineapple shirt holding him.







Sorry for the long post and all the pictures. This is just a hobby I am so grateful to have found. It changed my life. And all thanks to one tiny, cold, lost dekays!


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