WHIG-STANDARD (Kingston, Ontario) 28 September 04 Mystery snake on loose: After taking television apart, snake nowhere to be found (Jack Chiang and Ian Elliot)
Gananoque: Christine Lund of Gananoque was watching a movie called Practical Magic on Sunday night when she noticed something strange slithering across her television screen.
"I screamed!" Lund recalled yesterday.
Her husband, Peter Lorenz, who was getting ready to go to bed, rushed downstairs to the basement, where Lund had been enjoying the show on their 56-inch wide-screen TV.
"I thought he was going to scoop it off, but it was on the inside," Lund recalled of her husband's discovery.
The crawlie turned out to be a small snake that appeared to be inside the television, an RCA model that was assembled in Mexico.
The snake, about the size and length of a ballpoint pen, was wiggling between the protective glass and the screen.
Lund and Lorenz wondered if it could be an exotic, perhaps even poisonous, species that hitched a ride north.
Realizing there was nothing he could do to get the snake out, Lorenz did what any person would have done: He took some pictures of the unrecognizable snake.
Their eight-year-old daughter Hannah slept through the commotion.
Lorenz, a Gananoque Police constable, told The Whig-Standard that when he eventually went to bed at midnight, he did his best to keep the snake where it was.
"I kept the TV on, thinking the warmth would keep him up there. But when I came downstairs this morning, it was gone," he said.
Lund and Lorenz assumed the snake was still inside the TV set.
Yesterday, Lund spent much of the day phoning everyone who might be able to help: The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, the Future Shop outlet where the couple bought the TV in July and, of course, the Kingston Humane Society.
Future Shop dispatched Jim Wagar of Montgomery Electronics in Kingston to take the television set apart to retrieve the snake.
The Kingston Humane Society told Lund about a few young Kingston volunteers who were interested in helping people get rid of unwanted creatures. They showed up, too.
So, yesterday afternoon, Wagar, along with Brad Alexander, David Shaw and Crystal Davis were on their hands and knees in the basement of Lorenz and Lund's home.
As Wagar was taking the TV apart, Shaw, Alexander and Davis looked for the snake.
It was nowhere to be found.
Now, they wonder if it escaped the cabinet and is hiding out in the basement.
Lorenz was glad he had some photographic proof of what they saw.
"At least we have some pictures, so people wouldn't think we're totally crazy," Lorenz.
"No, we're not crazy," Lund reiterated.
Snake experts contacted by The Whig yesterday say the species was hard to identify because the photos snapped by Lorenz are a bit blurry.
They said it was probably not a Mexican import.
They suspected it was a snake native to this part of eastern Ontario and it got into the house and saw the television as a warm place to curl up as the nights get colder.
"The first thing you want to do is rule out the native species," said Jeff Feltham of Reptilia, a Vaughan company that offers educational programs and kids' parties concerning what it calls "largely misunderstood and feared" creatures.
He said many discoveries of what appear to be exotic reptiles are actually local species, but he said truly rare snakes do show up, thanks to transnational shipping.
"We've had people bring in three-foot-long corn snakes they found in a plant bought at Home Depot," said Feltham.
The snakes can get into the containers when goods from Central America are stored in Florida before being trucked north.
The goods are often stored in the open and snakes and other creatures get into them and are inadvertently shipped.
Because of the absence of snake dung or other detritus in the TV case, it seems unlikely that the snake had been living there for any length of time.
Paul "Little Ray" Goulet of Ottawa, who operates Little Ray's Reptile Zoo in Ottawa which also has education as part of its mission, said the snake appeared to him to be a non-poisonous water snake common to the area.
The Lunds don't live far from the shore.
"I'm 96 per cent sure that it's a baby northern water snake," Goulet told The Whig-Standard yesterday.
He also said he's been called by people who have found reptiles hitchhiking on all sorts of commodities, from U-Hauls to foreign goods imported into Canada from warmer climes.
Snakes can go a long time between feeds, which allows them to perform some impressive long-distance voyages. One snake managed to go a record 18 months without eating and was none the worse for wear.
Mystery snake on loose