There’s nothing like a story about a nomadic snake to capture our attention. I personally think it has something to do with the heebie-jeebies we get whenever there is a surprise encounter between man and reptile.
In this case it was a Geneva woman who recently encountered a four-and-a-half-foot ball python that had been sunning itself on a neighbor’s front porch, then slithered away underneath the rear of the car parked in the driveway and disappeared above a tire.
It required a professional wildlife service and an auto repair car lift to finally locate the python wrapped stubbornly around an area above the vehicle’s axle, but only after a considerable search that also meant removing the back tires.
Even then, it took Brad Lundsteen, owner of Suburban Wildlife Control, about 30 minutes to convince the python to loosen its visor grip on the car’s undercarriage.
The story, which hit print and TV media last week, was of course great publicity for the Campton Hills man, who has been taking care of wayward wildlife for nearly 40 years and considers raccoons, opossums, bats, groundhogs and yellow jackets the “bread and butter” of this business he runs with wife Katy. But he gets about a dozen calls a year, he added, to help get rid of snakes that wander in from the wild.
Most times these reptiles, which can easily get through small cracks in foundations or siding, or gaps in window molding or uneven door jambs, find their way into damp and quiet basements. But they also like the underbelly of vehicles, which are like a “heat rock” with all that warm metal, he noted.
Lundsteen has received about 30 calls in his long career similar to the Geneva case. A couple decades ago, for example, a 16-foot Burma python escaped its cage inside an Elgin apartment, climbed out the window and down to the ground, then wrapped itself around the wheel of a nearby car.
Six police officers failed to remove it, he recalled. And it took him a good 45 minutes of prodding and poking to distract the snake enough to loosen its tight hold.
“You have to finesse them off,” he added.
Lundsteen is not convinced the Geneva python had gotten loose or been abandoned. Instead, he thinks it might have come in on the Toyota sedan that had been purchased online several months earlier.
Turns out reptiles love to hitch rides, as Lundsteen found out personally after realizing a snake was under the hood of his truck upon his immediate return from a 2020 Christmas vacation to Florida.
As soon as he started the diesel engine on this snowy 20-below night, Lundsteen could hear the rattling tail of the snake, tucked in a pocket of welded metal under the hood and “impossible to get it out without taking a welding torch” to the $80,000 truck.
“I guarantee you snakes hitch rides more than people think,” he said, then recalled another job that involved helping round up a “whole trailer full of lizards” that came in to a factory on a truck from the southern part of the country.
“There were 15 (lizards) in all,” Lundsteen said, then added to my heebie-jeebies when he told me about another job involving a cottonmouth snake that likely had found its way to Geneva via our roadways.
Despite the publicity the Geneva snake received, no one has stepped forward to claim this lost reptile. And even though a few callers have offered to take it, Lundsteen is not relinquishing the snake until he’s confident that person is a responsible snake owner – unlike yours truly.
One reason this story caught my attention was because of my own checkered past. Having grown up in western Kansas where rattlesnakes are common, I have never been a fan of anything that slithers. Which is why I should have had my head examined after agreeing to let my then 10-year-old son get a boa constrictor for Christmas.
We named the baby snake Waldo and for a few years watched him grow … and grow … and grow. Until that fateful day when I noticed the snake was becoming more lethargic and decided to take him out of his cage, placing him on the front lawn so he could enjoy the fresh air and sunshine.
Convinced Waldo would not go far because of how slow he was moving, I turned my back on him for about 15 minutes, only to discover he was nowhere to be seen, even after searching high and low for the rest of the afternoon.
Where’s Waldo? Who knows. To this day I feel guilty, not just about the fact he could have surprised a neighbor by turning up on a porch or under a car hood, but because we had no business taking on the responsibility of such a reptile.
That’s the second message Lundsteen wants to leave with us: Know what you’re getting into before buying a snake.
“I personally think they are a boring pet,” he said, then quickly added this Geneva python is in great hands until the right person comes along.
“We are picky,” he said. “We want to find it the perfect home.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
