The 10-foot python might have slipped away, had it not been for quick-thinking neighbors.
People in the Ferguson Township neighborhood around Linn Street had been on alert since police warned Monday that the snake had somehow slithered away from its wooden cage in the driveway of a Linn Street home.
It was not until Wednesday evening that the surreptitious snake reappeared and was captured in a yard on Harris Street.
“It took a lot of time and much consternation amongst the community,” township Police Chief Diane Conrad said. “We received many phone calls from people concerned about safety.”
Conrad said police took the snake Thursday morning to Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland in Allenwood, which agreed to adopt it.
Eric Bowman, of Harris Street, suspected the snake might be around when he went outside Wednesday evening and noticed there weren’t any squirrels out. The newspaper he uses as a cover in his backyard garden had been disturbed.
“I was really frustrated because a bunch of stuff had been moved around,” Bowman said. He told his roommate, “I bet it’s that snake.”
His dog, a beagle, seemed uneasy too, growling from inside the house. Bowman said he went through the house, opened the front door and saw a couple in a car, rolling down a window.
They’d seen the snake in a nearby yard and were trying to track it.
Then he saw the snake. Bowman called police, then encouraged the people who were turning up to form a semi-circle around the yard, to contain the
snake.
“I didn’t want it to leave,” Bowman said.
Police arrived, and the owner of the snake was able to get the animal back in a cage, even though, Bowman said, the snake was “bolting around like lightning.”
Police took the snake into custody and held it in an animal cage at the station until it could be taken to Reptiland.
Conrad said her office is looking at applicable laws to determine whether charges should be filed against the snake’s owner.
The python, which is nonvenomous and hunts by strangling its prey, had gone missing on June 18, but was recovered by its owner the next day, before being reported missing Monday.
Conrad said keeping an exotic animal is not allowed under the zoning in that residential district.