CHAPEL HILL — Some Chapel Hill postal workers think a boa constrictor may be loose after a letter carrier found a 4-foot snakeskin on his route this week.
A state snake expert thinks they may be right.
“It’s a boa or python; that’s all I can be sure of,” said Jeffrey C. Beane, collections manager for herpetology for the N.C. State Museum of Natural Sciences, after he saw photographs of the skin.
Postal worker Neal Carroll found the skin Monday in the grass off Davie Circle, near East Franklin Street.
“I thought it was possibly a copperhead,” he said. “A huge, huge copperhead.”
So Carroll took the snakeskin back to the post office.
“And this guy said, ‘That’s a boa’ – and he owns a boa,” he said.
The people who lived in the house closest to where Carroll found the snakeskin recently moved, and the house is vacant, he said.
Postal worker Ariel Bassett has a 3-year-old granddaughter on Davie Circle, and she’s worried.
“It’s big. It’s big,” she said. “It’s not like any snakeskin I’ve ever seen.”
The Orange County Animal Service Department doesn’t have an expert on exotic snakes and had no immediate plans to go look for one, manager Irene Phipps said. If someone sees the snake, Phipps said, “We would certainly want to remove it, especially if it is not indigenous to the area.”
A snake sheds its skin like a person pulling off a pair of socks, so the “shed” is inside out and can be hard to read, said Grover Barfield, director of the Carolinas Reptile Rescue and Education Center in Mount Holly.
Barfield sent photographs by e-mail of Carroll’s snakeskin to Beane, who replied in an e-mail that the skin belonged to a constrictor snake. “Might be boa constrictor, but I can’t see enough of the pattern well enough to be sure,” he wrote.
The skin would be a little longer than the snake, Barfield said. So even a boa that size would pose little to no danger to humans and pets.
“Best it could eat would be a large rat,” he said.
That doesn’t mean people should try to pick it up, said Judy Jones, a biology teacher at East Chapel Hill High School.
She used to keep a boa and has a 13-foot python, another constricting species, in her classroom.
“It isn’t venomous,” Jones said of the could-be boa. “I’d be much more nervous around a copperhead. But they can bite. I got bitten once, and it hurt.”
On Wednesday, Carroll, in postal worker shorts, poked in the grass to show where he had found the skin. He’s used to seeing snakes on his route, including a large black snake that likes to lie on the wrought iron railings of one house.
But this skin, stretching from his feet to mid-chest, was like nothing he’d seen before.
“It was alarming to me,” he said.