The serpentine belt found in most modern engines gets its name from its snake-like shape. Firefighters in Scottsdale, Arizona, had the unexpected opportunity to compare this crucial piece of rubber with the limbless reptile it’s named after when they received a call from a man who found a boa constrictor—a huge, non-venomous snake—hitching a ride in the underbody of his Chevrolet Silverado 2500 HD.
Posting on Facebook, the Scottsdale Fire Department explained that the truck’s owner noticed a snake’s head poking out from the underbody after driving from Mesa to Scottsdale, which is a roughly 10-mile trip. Finding a rodent under a car or in an engine bay isn’t unusual, especially as the temperatures drop; critters see your daily driver as a relatively warm and safe place to find shelter. But spotting a boa constrictor in a pickup after a short trip through Arizona is far more unusual: the big snake’s natural habitat stretches from northern Mexico to Argentina.
“I thought it was a grocery bag or some sort of plastic. Maybe I ran over something. So, I walked back over to the truck to see what it was, and was totally shocked to see this big ol’ snake looking down and looking right back at me,” Aaron Ricks, the Silverado’s owner, told Fox 10. The crew that responded to the call was initially skeptical as well. “They said they didn’t believe there would be a snake in the truck,” Ricks added.
It sounds like the snake is a pet that slithered away from its home, which hopefully made the task of removing it easier than if firefighters were dealing with a wild one that had never been in contact with a human. Working with thick gloves and an animal-control grasper, the firefighters removed the Silverado’s front skid plate to extract the massive snake and, after posing for pictures, put it in a box. The hitchhiking boa was unharmed and taken to the Arizona Herpetological Society for care. If you live in the Mesa area and you’re missing a boa, you know who to call.
How the boa ended up tucked behind the Silverado’s skid plate remains a mystery. Similarly, there’s no word on whether it damaged anything under the hood. Boa constrictors kill their prey by wrapping their body around it and squeezing, which explains the “constrictor” part of the name. The bigger ones are capable of killing large animals, such as wild pigs, so we imagine one could easily crack, say, a radiator, if it felt the need to.
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