A woman in the San Marcos area of San Pedro Town was shocked when she found a ten foot long boa constrictor under her home earlier this week. Fortunately for her, ACES - whose volunteers live nearby - has branched out from removing and rehabilitating crocodiles to wildlife in general. So when they got the call about the Boa, one of their board members, Ben Sept, sprang into action. He told us more about it via Zoom today.
Ben Sept, Board Member, ACES
"So we just moved into the area here and met the neighbors within the last couple of months and I was actually at work when I got a phone call from the neighbor letting me know that she had a really large boa in her yard so I just hopped down the stairs and got my wife and a couple of my kids came out as well and went into her yard. With all the rain we've had in the last couple of days, it was really quite deep, the water, and the snake was in her yard so we proceeded to kind of put it into an area where we could gather the snake and it was a very simple capture, really, no issues."
"The snake was actually in transport and was moving away and did not want anything to do with us. It's also a boa so they're non-venomous. They're really not out to hurt anyone. We believe because the area that we captured the snake, there's just been so much deforestation due to some of the construction in the area that the snake was probably just on the move, looking to relocate a little bit, and because there's not a lot of green space left, it didn't have a lot of, it didn't really have anywhere to go. So we captured the snake, we took it back to ACES and we just did a basic intake, did a measurement, it was about 43 pounds, almost 10 feet long, beautiful snake, very well fed so raccoons, rats in this area, it's been living well in this area and unfortunately that probably means now that we've had to relocate her that we'll probably see some of those rodent population increase now."
"In terms of the comparison between a crocodile and a boa, we had to go on a, around 11 or more foot crocodile just last month that was probably over 400 pounds, it's a much more tedious capture, obviously, they've got a lot more weight and both ends are rather dangerous on a crocodile, but the tail as well as the head. With the boa, she really was not aggressive whatsoever, she just wanted to move on and so when we did the capture, she didn't really fight too much, we ended up putting her in a pillow case and she just rested and relaxed in the pillowcase until we took her into the intake and did the release."
Both this 43 pound boa and a smaller one were released yesterday.
And, later on in the news - we have another snake related story - as a snakebitten family in Belize City gets a new house.
