The Villager Newspaper Online Your Community News – Cleveland's Westshore
Bay Village resident Kevin Davey entertained Secret Bay Village Facebook readers last fall with his “Secret Bay Village Snake Hunter – Basement Edition.” Here are his stories from this past fall. Click here to read his 5 month update story.
August 31, 2021
UPDATE: Day 3 of “Snake in Basement” Adventures – I’ve now caught 5 of these in one area of basement. When will this madness end?
ORIGINAL POST: Any snake experts out there? My Wife found these two little guys (each about 7 inches long) in our BASEMENT tonight. She hates snakes, so finding them was a nice surprise for her birthday of all days! Anyhow I am trying to identify them so I can release them in Cahoon Park, either in the woods or by the creek (depending on what they are)… if they are poisonous, you might new a new For Sale sign on our lawn at 8 AM tomorrow…
UPDATE: 10 AM, caught #3 this morning. How many more in this family?
UPDATE: 4 PM, caught #4. At this point, I’m considering an Easter Egg hunt for Bay Villagers, but looking for snakes instead of Easter Eggs…
September 2, 2021
OK, since a lot of you were asking (well maybe 1 person asked), I thought I’d give an update on “Bay Village Snake Hunters – Basement Edition.”
In our last episode on Tuesday night, the lovely Amy Fraraccio Davey encountered two 7 inch long snakes in our basement (think very long skinny pencils). These snakes were identified by wildlife biologists as Northern Water Snakes, probably recently born.
On Wednesday, I found 2 more in the basement. One pictured below, was gracious enough to show us his “school picture day smile.” I call him “Bitey.”
On Thursday, I found another one, bringing the total to 5 (yes, FIVE snakes. All alive. In my basement. Over 3 different days. UGH!). The latest snake was still molting (see photo), so he is probably a week old at most. (By the way, don’t tell Amy this, but these snakes apparently give live birth to up to 30 snakes – no eggs for these bad boys).
So, after consulting with various experts, who suggested moving out of the house, selling the house, and/or burning the house down (not in that order), a pest expert suggested I place flour on the basement floor to at least track the movements of any new snakes (they have all been in one specific area – oh Lord how I hope that remains true!).
We will see how this works out – we will see slitherly snake paths in the flour? Will I find the source of the snake factory? Will Amy and the kids move out? Will Kevin be committed to a snake free mental hospital? Check back for our next episode!
NOTE: I should add that no snakes were harmed for this story. I safely removed the snakes and placed them right outside your basement.
September 5, 2021
Here is the last? episode of “Secret Bay Village Snake Hunters – Basement Edition.” Sorry for the delay. But like most of the women I dated, you will probably be highly disappointed in me by the time you finish this…
For those of you new to the story, over 3 days I captured 5 LIVE baby northern water snakes in my basement. Photos below.
Anyhow, to “solve” the problem I tried a 3 prong “dummy’s guide to snake removal” approach: flour on the floor to track any new snakes (I did not contemplate what I’d do if I found tracks in the flour, but no snake!) , a minnow trap to catch snakes (with yummy fishy smelling baby snake food – trap suggested by Mark Norton – actually a great idea!), and a rubber decoy snake to make snakes feel comfortable and safe (like the decoy gophers Bill Murray used in Caddyshack).
So I patiently waited for 3 days, and NOTHING happened! Either this mom snake gave birth to only 5 snakes (instead of the usual 90), or there might be dozens of snakes (or snake carcasses) still in the basement, waiting to be discovered. I hope for the former, but expect the latter.
My beautiful wife Amy Fraraccio Davey thankfully did not take the kids and move out, leaving me alone in the snake house. Although I do have to accompany her on trips to basement for the foreseeable future (10 years, I’m guessing).
I will post any updates (trying to clean up all the flour I poured on the basement floor might be post worthy), but the next thing you hear about the great snake infestation of 2021 might be the fire department sirens coming to save our burning house (I think a few more live snakes would officially qualify the house as “burn worthy.”)
Thanks for reading!
September 6, 2021
Oh Gawd. Buckle in for episode number 4 of “Secret Bay Village Snake Hunters – Basement Edition.”
Remember in my last post, how I had joked about what I’d do if I found snake tracks in the flour, but no snake? HAHAHA! I think we all had a good chuckle about that one. Finding actual snakes is one thing (5 on 3 different days, as of yesterday), but NOT finding a snake you know is somewhere in your basement? That is a whole other level of terror for me (and Amy Fraraccio Davey)!
Anyhow, this morning I went down to check on the flour trap. Good news is I did not find a single solitary “snake slithering through the flour” track.
The bad news?
I found FIVE track marks! Better yet, all these tracks were in different spots in my flour trap area (attached is a photo of slither marks on just the sump pump cover). Does this mean 1 snake, who in 12 hours slithered all over 15 feet of my basement? Or maybe 5 snakes, with each staying in their own area? Ahhhh!
Now I HAD to find at least one snake, to keep my marriage intact and prevent my house from burning down (I swear I saw my wife dusting off a gas can in the garage). It took about 30 minutes, but I found #6 right where #1-5 all were! The rest of my Labor Day I guess will be spent hunting for more (because – again, let’s keep this fact from my wife – there is no way I think this snake made all these marks, as he (she?) was pretty lethargic when I picked it up. Of course, maybe this snake was just tuckered out from racing around my basement all night…
Here is a photo of #6, along with a pencil for reference (per reader request). Little guy, for sure, but still creepy. And sadly, I am getting better at snake wrangling – I picked this one up with my bare hands, not a glove!
Snake Count: 6 snakes since Tuesday Aug 31, found on 4 different days.
As always, I hope this is the last update, but in my heart I know there is more to come!
September 8, 2021
Previously on “Secret Bay Village Snake Hunters – Basement Edition,” I had captured 6 baby Northern Water Snakes in the past week or so in my basement.
That total is now 7 snakes, and I’ll get to that in a bit. Hopefully, for my family’s mental health, today is the series finale.
First, I’d like to back up a bit, because most new readers (scratch that, probably ALL readers) are probably wondering at this point “how did this mouth breathing nincompoop let 7 snakes in his house in less than a week?”
I know I’d be asking that question, but in my defense, the whole situation just sort of slithered up on me (blatant lame snake humor).
I guess my attitude towards all this can be summed up in the initial snake encounter last Tuesday:
Blood curdling scream #1 in basement, from Amy Fraraccio Davey – Me: “She must have found a spider.”
Scream #2 – Me, safely sitting upstairs: “Ok, maybe a mouse.”
Scream #3 – Me: “Hmmm, live mouse? rat?”
Screams #4, 5 and 6 – Me, still sitting: “Wow, she is really a good screamer.”
Scream #7 – Me: “Oh, maybe I should go check it out.”
A good husband would have flown down the stairs to the basement after scream #1, definitely by scream #5. I guess I’m kind of lame that way.
Anyway, I think I made up for it by catching many, many snakes, and even touching a few with my bare hands (I am a city boy, for sure)!
So, onto the story of number 7…
After seeing snake tracks in the flour and finding #6 (my kids and I stopped naming them after “Bitey” – #4 – or was that #3?), I waited until late in the day to re-dust the floor with flour, and plug some possible access points.
I decided to check the snake trap that Mark Norton suggested (see photo), and guess what? I caught one in the trap! The trap actually worked (that is a good thing, right?). Apparently, the smell of cooked salmon was too much to resist.
#7 was the biggest one yet, though, which scared me. Time for drastic measures!
I’m guessing now (seriously? Like I haven’t been guessing all along?) that these snakes are coming up from the sump pump, or from a floor drain with a grate on it. So, I covered the drain completely (and put a big rock on top for good measure), and I sealed all the openings around the sump pump pipes. Sprinkled lots of flour over both.
My working theory is the sewer drain or sump pump was the point of entry, and mama snake was never in the basement, but the babies found their way out of those pipes and into my basement.
This latest theory is a bit disconcerting, because I’ve lived most of my adult life with sump pumps and basement drains, never imagining that snakes could actually come out of them to wreak havoc! My new life rule is snakes could emerge anywhere I can stick a pencil (see photo). Not good.
If another snake gets in now, all my theories are shot to heck, and I go to Plan B (lots of fire).
I kind of hope that wraps things up, but I am keeping the flour on the floor for another week (partly because I have not figured out how to vacuum it up without it blowing all over the basement).
And of course, all snakes involved in this drama were safely released – closer to your house than you probably would like. Photo of #7 is below, in a local creek. I won’t say which creek, but let’s just say I did not release #7 on a Sunday…
September 21, 2021
Just when you thought it was safe to go back down to the basement, I present the latest installment of “Secret Bay Village Snake Hunters – Basement Edition.”
I am titling this episode “Mom.” (Cue ominous music)
First, just to recap, from August 31 to Sep 6, my wife Amy Fraraccio Davey first discovered, and I eventually captured, 7 baby Northern Water Snakes (each about 7-8 inches long, thick as a pencil), squirming around in our basement. Never more than 2 in a day. I’d be remiss not to point out that the mom snake typically gives live birth to 30 to 90 snakes. I found only 7 (uh oh). Plus, the mom typically bolts right after giving birth, leaving baby snakes to fend for themselves. This was reassuring, in a weird way. I did not want to meet mama snake – she could be 2-4+ feet long!
As you can tell, I have learned WAY too much about this particular snake species!
At the end of those 6 or 7 skin crawling days, I dusted flour on the basement floor (used to track remaining snake movements) and then left it there for a week, until I figured out how to clean up about 1.5 pounds of flour without making a huge mess. Eventually I settled on having a shop vac outside the basement with a suction hose coming thru a window. That way I would avoid flour blowing all over the basement from the vacuum exhaust.
Anyhow, that cleanup worked out great, but before I started I noticed some of the flour had what looked like “s” tracks in it. I thought maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me – seeing imaginary track marks that were not there – or maybe it was our dog who did it. I did not want, under any circumstances, to believe there were still snakes living in our basement 2 weeks after the first ones were captured. “Ignorance is bliss” comes to mind. I went with that thought.
In any event, I kept quiet and did not tell Amy my suspicions. You know the saying “happy wife, happy life?” It definitely holds true here.
Since I was still unsure about some possible leftover baby snakes in our basement, I decided to sprinkle another 4 cups of flour on the floor. Every day, I’d diligently go down and check for tracks. Every day things looked great – until yesterday (Monday, Sept 20). What did I find? More “s” tracks. I could not talk myself out of ignoring these tracks. There was still at least one snake in our basement. Alive. And probably still thriving, after almost a month living down there.
I had to tell Amy this. Of course, she freaked, so I freaked. I was in big trouble. Time to seriously ramp up my snake hunting game.
I got an old laptop from the closet. It had a webcam built in, and years ago I had installed some motion detecting webcam software on it. (As a side note, this is a great thing to try with your kids – set up a motion detecting camera pointed out a window, put some food outside, and see if animals come overnight to eat it. When we lived in Westlake, in just one night we had a raccoon, a possum and a skunk all caught on camera. My kids thought it was awesome – especially when the possum and skunk almost got into a fight.)
I got some LED studio photography lights, and set up the laptop on the basement floor. Below is a photo of what the motion camera would capture. You can see flour on the floor, and the sump pump in the background. It looked like a little movie set. Now we just needed our star or stars to appear.
I woke up this morning, and there were motion detected photos taken during the night. Maybe something was down there! Alas, most of the 14 “motion events” were false alarms. But then there was this (see photo “WTH”). Whatever this was only appeared in 3 photos, each 1 second apart. 5:44 this morning. And then, this mystery creature (which sort of looked snake-like) vanished.
As my youngest son said “Dad, that looks like a BIG snake.”
Crap.
So I got my gloves, went down in the basement (up until now I was reviewing all these photos from the sanctity of my 2nd floor office – thank you remote desktop software!) and I started searching.
I did not have to look long.
Remember how in earlier episodes I mentioned how the snakes seemed lethargic? Our basement is under the original 1940’s era part of the house, and the heating/cooling ducts leak a lot. The basement is very cold in summer, very warm in winter. And snakes like warmth. Thankfully, in cold they are slow and they search for warm spots.
So, guess where I found the snake? Right on the nice warm laptop keyboard! A pretty smart snake, if I do say so myself – it found the warmest spot down there. Photo below. For reference this is a 17 inch laptop, and by my crude Microsoft Paint pixel measurements this snake is about 34 inches long – almost 3 freakin’ feet! This has to be the MOM snake! I yelped with joy, fear, disgust and jubilation.
Now I had to catch it and get it OUT OF MY LIFE. I knew this mom snake would be fast – it was nice and warm – and I was scared. The baby snakes were cute, thin and little. This snake was big, thick, long and not so cute. If I screwed this up and mom got away, I’d have no plausible defense in divorce court. I’d be forever branded as a bad husband, bad father, and – worst of all – a bad snake catcher.
Once I got my courage up (I normally do not drink at 6 AM on a weekday, but here we are), I jostled the laptop a bit, and mom did not move. The keyboard was just too warm and inviting. So I made my move. I quickly picked up the laptop, tipped it over a storage container, and mom slid in. Luckily I covered the container before she climbed out, because she was PISSED. And moving very fast.
Anyhow, with mama snake safely in the covered container, I gave her some water and some bugs, and after school my kids and I released her in “No Sunday fun allowed by law” creek – where she belongs (photo and video below). Heck, maybe she will reunite with her kids, and they can laugh and reminisce about the time they lived almost a month in some poor schmuck’s basement.
As for me, Amy and the family, the motion camera is staying for a little while. Probably for like 6 or 7 years – just to make sure all snakes are gone. I’ve told everyone to expect baby snake carcasses, too. We have some basement cleaning in our future and it could get ugly.
To (hopefully) wrap this all up, if you are driving around Bay sometime in the middle of the night, and you see very bright lights coming from a basement, you may be witness to the filming of another episode of “SBVSH- Basement Edition.” But honestly, I hope not. I am about done with snake adventures!
September 28, 2021
6 foot rat snake found outside in North Ridgeville? Not fun for sure, but I like that scenario a lot more than my 8 feet of total snake (if we laid them end to end, which would be interesting to try), with 8 – no, make that 9 – total snake heads IN MY BASEMENT.
You might say, “hey, I thought you caught 7 baby snakes and 1 mom snake? That is 8 total, why did you say 9 snakes?”
Well, let me introduce you to #9, who was caught playing in flour today by my snake cam (see photo)….
Oh, and by the way, I have NOT caught him yet, so the Davey family is bravely sleeping in a house with a known medium size (18-24 inch) snake running the show from the basement.
I may have more of a story if/when I catch #9, or when my family leaves me, whichever comes first. Next step if I can’t catch might be glue boards all over the basement.
And by the way, you might think I am making this up – 9 snakes in the last month? All alive in the basement? Can’t be real! Trust me, it is real, and I wish it wasn’t!!!
