liquidleaf
New member
So, Saturday morning I checked on my snakes, as I do every day or every other day.
What a horrible sinking pit in my stomach when I realized that Warhol ('06 pos. super hypo male) was not in his cage, and the sliding door was pushed open just enough for him to have squeezed out.
Plus, I live in a cold climate, so anything outside of the snake room is about 65*F, and it's an old house with plenty of nooks and crannies, not to mention two cats and a dog, and an unheated crawlspace under the house.
I proceeded to carefully move and look under and around everything in the snake room, and was finally starting to think that he must be under the house, or outside...
I happened to glance over at the window area. Before we made that room our snake room, we had found that the drywall under the window was damaged an old leak, and had taken some of the powdery drywall down. We were planning on replacing the old window with an efficient one, but hadn't gotten to it yet. The wall insulation was exposed in that area (another reason I was hopeless, thinking he'd gotten in the walls). He's still pretty small (a little thicker than a quarter's diameter at his largest point).
But - on one piece of insulation, I happened to see his tail draped over, holding on... I didn't even realize what I was looking at, at first.
So of course I touched his tail, fearing that he'd be stiff and dead. He reacted and started pulling his tail into the wall - I don't think I've grabbed and pulled anything so fast in my life. He popped out of the wall pretty cold, but quite alive.
His cage (and any other slide-doors that didn't have one) has a new display-lock
but he's in detention in a smaller cage at a higher temp for now because I'm scared he might develop an RI over this escapade (no mucous or anything yet), after giving him a bath to make sure he didn't have any fiberglass on him.
Poor guy. Must've thought he'd blend in with the pink insulation.
Any advice for anything else to look for? Fortunately he was almost due to eat when he got out, so he didn't have a fresh meal in his belly. He may have only been out a few hours, but for as long as two days or so, at about 72*. He was positioned a couple of feet above the room's hot water radiator, so hopefully he got a little extra warmth from there.
What a horrible sinking pit in my stomach when I realized that Warhol ('06 pos. super hypo male) was not in his cage, and the sliding door was pushed open just enough for him to have squeezed out.
Plus, I live in a cold climate, so anything outside of the snake room is about 65*F, and it's an old house with plenty of nooks and crannies, not to mention two cats and a dog, and an unheated crawlspace under the house.
I proceeded to carefully move and look under and around everything in the snake room, and was finally starting to think that he must be under the house, or outside...
I happened to glance over at the window area. Before we made that room our snake room, we had found that the drywall under the window was damaged an old leak, and had taken some of the powdery drywall down. We were planning on replacing the old window with an efficient one, but hadn't gotten to it yet. The wall insulation was exposed in that area (another reason I was hopeless, thinking he'd gotten in the walls). He's still pretty small (a little thicker than a quarter's diameter at his largest point).
But - on one piece of insulation, I happened to see his tail draped over, holding on... I didn't even realize what I was looking at, at first.
So of course I touched his tail, fearing that he'd be stiff and dead. He reacted and started pulling his tail into the wall - I don't think I've grabbed and pulled anything so fast in my life. He popped out of the wall pretty cold, but quite alive.
His cage (and any other slide-doors that didn't have one) has a new display-lock
but he's in detention in a smaller cage at a higher temp for now because I'm scared he might develop an RI over this escapade (no mucous or anything yet), after giving him a bath to make sure he didn't have any fiberglass on him.Poor guy. Must've thought he'd blend in with the pink insulation.
Any advice for anything else to look for? Fortunately he was almost due to eat when he got out, so he didn't have a fresh meal in his belly. He may have only been out a few hours, but for as long as two days or so, at about 72*. He was positioned a couple of feet above the room's hot water radiator, so hopefully he got a little extra warmth from there.
