Richard Wood was out on his property in Hoke County, N.C., recently when he noticed something odd at the edge of a field: a dark, slender shape standing upright where no fence post belonged. He figured someone had left behind an old stake. He was wrong.
"Lo and behold, it wasn't a fence post; it was a snake," Wood told WRAL News, in an account relayed by UPI. The animal was a boa constrictor, 6 to 7 feet long, that had gone missing about a month earlier from a home four doors down from Wood's property.
The Hoke County Animal Shelter had alerted residents in early October that a pet boa had escaped near Calloway Road and Summer Lane in Raeford, asking anyone who spotted it to keep a safe distance and call animal control rather than try to catch it themselves. The snake's owner had since moved out of town, leaving the animal in his father's care when it got loose.
Wood didn't wait for animal control, which told him it would take roughly 30 minutes to arrive. Instead, he called a friend who raises large snakes for advice, then enlisted his daughter, Peyton, to help. "Peyton got it by the tail. I got it around by his head. He went right in," Wood told WNCN-TV, describing how the two wrestled the boa into a plastic storage container.
The snake is now in the care of Matthew "Mountain Matt" George, a local exotic-animal handler known in the area for taking in loose reptiles, until its owner can retrieve it. Boa constrictors are popular pets for their relatively docile temperament, but they can grow past 10 feet and regularly slip out of unsecured enclosures — a pattern wildlife officials across the Southeast report every year as exotic pet ownership has grown.
For Wood, the month of uncertainty ended with a story he's likely to keep telling. The animal shelter said it has had no further sightings reported since the capture.
