ORRINGTON, Maine — Mr. Smithers, the 4-foot-long ball python that slithered away on July 7 from his home on Johnson Mill Road, has been found alive, his owner said Monday.
Valerie Nason said her pet snake was found at Ledgewood Gardens Greenhouses, where he apparently had hunkered down at some point after going missing more than three months ago.
“He may not survive. He’s in very, very, very terrible shape,” Nason said. “He will not eat or drink,” Nason said, adding that she likely would attempt to force feed him raw eggs Monday night.
“He’s been through a few frosts,” Nason said, noting that she has tucked him into his cage with a heat rock and his pink blanket.
“If I even try to touch him, he coils up like he’s in terrible pain. I actually can’t even see his little face,” she added.
Nason said that when two Penobscot County sheriff’s deputies knocked on her door last Wednesday, Mr. Smithers was far from her mind. She said she was worried they were there to deliver bad news.
“Then they said, ‘Ma’am, this isn’t bad because we found your snake,’” she said. “I was so happy that I was running to the van. They had him in this stone cold plastic tote, frozen, half dead. When I pulled him out, he was absolutely all limp, and then I was sad.
“I’ve just got to hope for the best,” she said.
Nason said the greenhouses are two doors up from her home.
“It’s amazing he was so close to my house,” she said.
Ledgewood Gardens owner Karen Ramsey said Monday that she and her mother were cleaning up around their greenhouses and putting them to bed for winter when she spotted Mr. Smithers.
“I actually went down the side of one and I almost stepped on him,” she said. “I back up and said … this snake doesn’t belong here. … I called 911, and a sheriff came and said we’ll take him home, and off he went.”
Ramsey said it was unusual to almost step on a snake that size.
“It was kind of luck that I saw him behind a bench. He wasn’t moving very fast. He definitely was cold, and I didn’t know if he was very well or not. At first I thought he was dead because he wasn’t moving, but then with the excitement of my mother coming to look and me looking, he moved a little bit and then he moved a bit more, and I thought, ‘Yeah. Mr. Smithers has been found,’” she said.
Ramsey said she doesn’t think the snake was where she found him the entire time he was missing.
She said she thinks Mr. Smithers might have been at a nearby stream but moved after the recent rainstorm that caused local flooding.
The greenhouses are not heated, so Mr. Smithers wouldn’t have lasted much longer had he not been found last week.
“It was cool [in terms of weather]. I’m surprised that he actually lasted that long,” Ramsey said.
She speculated that the python might have spent some time tucked away in a corner of an insulated section of a shed handy to the greenhouses.
“My dog likes to chase chipmunks, and and he was really adamant about that corner,” she said, noting that that happened four or five days before Mr. Smithers was found. “I’m assuming he was here for at least a week.”