The owner of a Chevrolet Silverado truck got a fright last week when they found an enormous boa constrictor snake hiding in their engine bay last week. Firefighters in Arizona were called to the scene to remove the snake, which had reportedly slithered into the engine bay looking to warm up.
The Scottsdale Fire Department was called to assist Silverado driver Aaron Ricks last week after he found a huge snake lurking underneath the hood of his truck, reports AutoEvolution. The snake was spotted peaking out from underneath his truck shortly after Ricks had driven 11 miles from Mesa to Scottsdale, Arizona.
When he parked after the trip, the Silverado owner spotted the head of the snake popping out from underneath the enormous truck, but didn’t expect to find a snake lurking under his Chevy:
At first, Aaron Ricks, the owner of the Silverado, thought he had picked up some grocery bag or some sort of plastic on the way.
“Maybe I ran over something. So, I walked back over 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 told Fox 10.
Ricks then called the fire service to come and help get the five-foot snake out of his truck, but at first they didn’t believe that it could really be a snake.
In a post on social media, Scottsdale Fire Department Ladder 608 crews explained that once they arrived on the scene and saw that it really was a slippery stowaway, they worked to carefully remove the truck’s skid plate to access the area that the snake’s hiding spot. They then extracted the enormous snake, before boxing it up and transporting it to the Arizona Herpetological Society for safe handling and care.
While snakes like the sidewinder and northern Pacific rattlesnake can be found in areas across Arizona, a boa constrictor isn’t the kind of reptile that you might stumble across on a hike in the state. That’s because these massive creatures, which can grow to up to 10 feet long, are normally found in central and south America.
The animals, which aren’t venomous, live in places like Mexico and Argentina where they can be found everywhere from deserts and wet tropical forests to open savannas. In the U.S., they’re kept as pets and don’t live in the wild.
When the snakes are seen in the wild across America it usually is in the engine bays of big trucks. Boas have repeatedly turned up in engine bays as they seek out the warmth of a recently used motor when they’re out of their heated tanks.
