Daily Sitka Sentinel

Pet Snake Beats Odds, Survives Sitka Winter Outdoors

By TOM HESSE

Sentinel Staff Writer

Snakes can winter in Sitka – or at least one can. 

Lavender, a corn snake found in a yard on Halibut Point Road Tuesday, has been reunited with her owner after being on the lam for almost a full year.

 Robin McNeilley reunited with her snake, Lavender. (Sentinel Photo by Reber Stein)

Robin McNeilley said she got the snake last April as a present for her daughter. Lavender escaped from her enclosure last August and didn’t reappear until Tuesday, having thwarted a massive search effort, local predators and the lawn mower of the man who found her while cutting grass in a yard.

“My chickens could have easily eaten this snake if it was in my own yard,” McNeilley said. “Birds love snakes. We have crows and ravens and even an eagle could have made a snack out of this. It survived a whole winter, almost no food, predators. (Corn snakes) are a heartier snake but they’re still a cold-blooded animal that needs help.” 

Jim Way spotted the 20-inch reptile Tuesday in the grass at 1305 Halibut Point Road. Way’s first instinct was to run it over, but instead he opted to give it refuge in a 5-gallon bucket. A photo of the snake ran in Wednesday’s edition of the Sentinel, leading to this morning’s reunion between Lavendar and McNeilley. 

“I saw the picture in the paper and she has really distinctive head markings, so I looked and I said ‘that looks like our snake,’” McNeilley said. “She looks a lot bigger in the newspaper, but then I saw there was a pen there for scale so I kind of skimmed the story and thought there was a really remote chance and I saw the address for where it was found, 1305, and I live at 1307. I thought, ‘that is my snake!’ 

Lavender spent the last two nights in a bucket at Way’s shop at the Baranof Island Housing Authority, where Way is the weatherization and construction manager. Way told the Sentinel the snake would repeatedly strike at people who got close, and McNeilley said Lavendar was certainly on the defensive during the reunion. 

“She was all coiled up and in that striking position that obviously had Jim (Way) freaked out a little bit and I reached into the bucket and scooped her up and they were all shocked. It was really funny as all these construction workers were afraid of this tiny snake. But she did have her defensive posture – her tail was wiggling, she was in a striking pose and I just picked her up,” McNeilley said. 

McNeilley said the snake lost some of its color – lavender, of course – and some of its weight during its year on the run. McNeilley attributes that to the stress of the experience.

When the snake first went missing McNeilley and her daughter spent weeks trying to find Lavender. 

“She felt pretty strongly about it and was really sad when it was gone. After it went missing I spent several weeks getting up at two, three in the morning to survey the house, because that’s prime snake time. We were hoping she was just lost in the house and that we could find her,” McNeilley said. “We put bait out and all these random things to try and get the snake back. And after a couple months I said, sorry, this thing is toast.”

Whether the snake found refuge indoors or outdoors is unknown but “it certainly over-wintered in Sitka without care.” It was a mild winter in Sitka but temperatures did dip below freezing several times between December and February. 

McNeilley said another challenge for the snake was food. Corn snakes feed on small mammals. 

“We feed her once a week – they can go for a couple of months without eating, so after that couple of months went by I figured she was gone,” she said

The snake’s true owner, McNeilley’s daughter, is out of town. 

“She’s not in town but she’s super excited. She’s in California, where we bought the snake. She was surprised and thrilled.” 

The man who found the snake while mowing the grass on HPR said he’s glad Lavender is back home.

“It’s pretty amazing it lasted a year,”  Way said. “I was surprised it was able to handle what it did here.”

He said the reunion between snake and owner was not particularly dramatic. Lavender was not especially friendly with the maintenance staff, striking at whoever lifted the lid of the bucket, so Way was impressed to see McNeilley reach in quickly and confidently to collect the snake.

McNeilley said “the whole response to snakes for a lot of people is to smash it. They create a pretty strong fear response, more in some people than others.” 

Way said it was apparent McNeilley knew her way around the snake in a way that he did not.  

“You felt she knew was she was doing,” Way said. “It was a happy ending to the snake story. Good thing I didn’t run it over.”