Sticky Rescue

We lost a snake.
How?
It escaped.
Slithered through a hole that had been unintentionally made at some point, most likely while cleaning the cage.
Gone.
For good.

So I thought.

I mean, we have a huge store, lots of nooks and crannies to hide in.
Lots of cracks to escape into the outdoors... (though less likely to happen in winter.)

In any case.
We had made plans to see if we could lure the snake back to us....
But due to business, we hadn't yet gotten around to it.

When, I got a call from one of my managers to come to the office.

Where he handed me a flat piece of paper.
One side sticky.
It was one of our vermin traps -that mostly catch loose crickets-
And stuck amongst all those crickets?

Was the snake.
The one we'd lost.
()_()
At first I thought it was dead.
It looked all flattened and squished.
But then I touched it, and the snake wiggled as much as it could under my touch.
He was flattened because his scales had stuck to the paper as he probably twisted to try and escape.

The guy who came to check the traps had found the snake, and had come to the manager to inform him of what he'd found.

If it were me, I would have assumed that the snake had died and left it at that.
But for some reason, my manager (who I wouldn't think would do such a thing) decided to inquire further. "What did it look like? Where is it now? Is it dead?"
As he had the suspicion, that if a snake was caught here...it had to be one of ours.
I mean....I don't think we've yet found a snake in the traps that wasn't ours....
(its also not often that we find snakes in the traps anyways...they don't get loose that often.)

The guy described the snake, explained that he'd thrown it away, and no...it was still ALIVE!
()_()
Why would you toss out a snake that was still alive?!?!!?

-of course...being in the pest business....it probably doesn't matter if it is still alive, it's caught, it's not going anywhere, and needs to be removed.

But really...in a petstore...you'd probably at least show the manager first before tossing it!

So the guy went back to the garbage and dug him out and gave him to my manager.
Which is where I came in.

My manager wanted to know if there was a way for us to get the snake unstuck from the trap.

Not by ourselves there wasn't.
Yet, I knew that we had freed other creatures (if you remember our leopard gecko that ran around the store for a year...) from these traps before.
It just involved....going to our vet.

I didn't know if he'd be able to help, as I remembered distinctly that he doesn't like dealing with reptiles...
But he'd freed our Gecko.
So I could only hope that he would be able to free our snake as well.

I ended up creating quite a stir in their portion of the store lol. Everyone wanted to see the snake stuck to the trap, wanted to help.
Which luckily, they could help. ^^

The vet took some mineral oil and a Q-tip, and started at the back of the snake ...
-leaving the head for last so that he wouldn't get bitten. lol (good plan...who knows how stressed he was. He definitely was cold from being stuck to the trap on cold concrete floors for a few days...)
...he squirted some of the oil next to the snake, and used it to detackify the trap enough to get the snake unstuck from it.

Slowly but surely, the snake was freed from the trap.
I ended up holding the snake as he was freed just to keep him from getting stuck on other parts of the trap.

And then.
He was free!
In my hands!
Free!

And looking none the worst for wear thankfully. ^^
Still I took him straight to the back to give a nice warm soak before placing him back in his home as he appeared to be fine enough, just needed a nice cozy spot to stay warm in. :)

As he'd only been missing for a week, and then, able to hunt crickets to his hearts content...so he still seems to be in fine health.

Yay for the rescue!! ^^
I'm glad we found him before it was too late. :)

Until you next see these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!

-Sarnic Dirchi