Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Well The other day I noticed my king snakes lid was stuck open on the corner. I search around but could not find him. The next day I uncovered my bird cage and noticed that two of my finches were missing, and the other where flying around kind of stange, to shorten my story I found him in there water bowl with a large lump in his stomach. Thats the hazards of keeping prey and preditor in the same room.

Jake

I had a very bad tempered female albino striped kingsnake escape from her cage a few years ago. She had been missing for 2 weeks when my beautiful young albino rosy boa went missing out of her cage. How that kingsnake got into, and more specifically, OUT of the rosy's cage after she'd eaten her is still a mystery to me to this day.
When she escaped it was mid-summer. She never did show up, but luckily no more animals went missing. Come late fall, the first time I turned the heat up the furnace made this weird squeaking noise and then shut off. It kept doing it, so I called a repair man. Guess what he found? the charred, but still recognizable body of that bloody kingsnake wrapped around the furnace blower-motor.
Since then I've had a young Brooksi (husband's fault) and more recently a young female mexican black (mystery) go missing...neither of them have showed up and I've searched everywhere. You're lucky!

We've had a few adventures with our kings too. First escapee is the one which, of course, we haven't been able to find. A gorgeous 50-50 female neonate that we'd had just a week. Turned out our reptile enclosure had a small hole in it for a wire to pass through. We didn't notice it until she disappeared. The only thing we've seen of her since then (disappeared in the fall) was a very recently shed skin discovered in our mouse room in February. We've also lost a few geckos and a couple of hatchling anoles in the mouse room, never seen anything of them since. We figure that the snake is still alive and fat and sassy on other escapees (not to mention the escaped mice). Lost another ground snake in the mouse room, mysteriously, but found it a month later on the floor of the mouse room. Some of the funniest escaped snake stories we have are another of our Kings, who escaped out of an enclosure i left ajar (oops). he crawled into bed with hubby and I. And our Arizona Mountain King escaped from her enclosure, don't remember how, but the next morning I was in the mouse room (which was NOT where the snake was kept) and something struck me as odd. I had to look around carefully before I finally realized that the red, black, and white decoration on the mouse cage was our missing Mountain king.

Anyway, the escapes make us more cautious. Hopefully we've had our last escapee.
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~Sasheena

and the kids: Tantilla, Tantillas, Lightning, Kinkee, Maple, Castle, Bishop, Queenie, Jester, Pandora, Phantom, Aphrodite, Athena, Hermes, and Lady

I've got a great story for you (it does not concern a kingsnake, but it's STILL a great one!).

Well, I lost a baby Trans-Pecos Rat Snake a few years back. Escaped due to my negligence. Anyway, the snake was hatched and lost in the fall of the year.
Needless to say, I looked everywhere for him, but to no avail...
...Fast-forward to early spring of the following year...My next-door neighbour turns up at my door with his young daughter and a rubbermaid container. Knowing that I keep snakes, they wanted to ask me about the odd-looking snake that they had found around the far side of their house, underneath a pile of last years fallen leaves, and, you guessed it, when I looked in the container there was my missing baby, in surprisingly good health, I might add! AMAZING!
He had escaped his enclosure, made it out of the basement, past my three ever-vigilant cats, gotten out of the house, travelled about 150 feet through a hedge and trees, etc and then, by the looks of it, found a nice hibernaculum beneath the pile of leaves against my neighbour's house and survived a vicious Canadian winter! I'm even going to guess that he might have found a meal or two, because he was in fantastic condition.
He was then christened "Lucky"!.
Our animals never cease to amaze me!

Cheers, all!

Simon