Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi, I had a 2 week old black pine snake escape last night!! STUPID STUPID ME. Can anyone help for this is my first escape ever!!. He escaped in the basement and my basement is big and full of nooks and crannies, boxes etc!!

thanks guys so much

We don't have basements here in south Texas, but you can cut the top of a 2 litre Coke bottle off and reverse it into itselfso it acts as a funnel. Tape it together and put a small food item in it. place it in a dark corner and check it periodically. The idea is for the snake to go into the bottle, eat the prey and hopefully digest in the calm, dark bottle. Sometimes the funnel acts as a good place to enter but the snake is a bit full to get back out. Depends on how big the snake is. A small box with a hole cut in it can work as well, I take a food item and make a scent trail along the floor near the wall leading to the dark corner. Most snakes will travel along the walls in their wanderings. Crinkled newspaper or celophane can work as an "alarm", you can hear the snake travel over the noisy papaer. Set a few empty soda cans along the walls, barely balanced, the snake crawls by them, knocks them over and the fallen cans location clues you to its' whereabouts. The last resort for me is the duct tape on the floor, make a loop and stick one side to the floor with the other sticky side up, catching the snake as it crawls over it. Use vegetable oil to remove snake, don't just peel it off, it may lose scales and/or skin! Good luck!
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Todd Hughes

You could also try using flat pieces of cardboad against the walls and dark places. Put a small wedge under the cardboard so he/she can climb under it. Kinda like fliping boards snake hunting.

Another thing you can do is just check through everything down there. Regardless of all the little cracks to slip into, it might be in all that stuff. I had a king escape one time and found him later inside a plastic bag full of close. He was somewhere in the middle between the cloths. There were a lot of places he could have escaped out of the house through. I had a Rosy boa get out when I was younger and found him crawling one night in my room where he escaped from his cage. He never left the room despite the gap under the door. There's still hope. Good luck.

thanks so much guys!! im going to try all the methods listed until shes found!!! littel sucker!!