Snake gets loose in serpentarium

WILMINGTON — The serpentarium on Orange Street in downtown Wilmington has some of the worlds deadliest snakes on display.

A local couple says one of those snakes — one of the most deadly — got loose over the weekend.

A snake was loose inside the serpentarium Saturday. A pair of visitors says it was the deadly green mamba snake. Workers at the serpentarium say that wasn’t the case.

Sina Norris and her husband got quite a scare Saturday at the serpentarium. They were looking at the exhibit for the venomous green mamba snake but couldn’t find the snake.

Norris said, “All of the sudden one of the girls standing next to me said, look up top there he is and there he was on top of the cage — the green mamba.”

Norris told the employees about what she saw, and was quickly ushered into the lobby. “Ten minutes later they came back out and said that everything was fine,” she said. “He said it was just a green snake.”

Tannith Tyrr works at the serpentaruim. She says the snake Norris saw on top of the cage was a dead ringer for the green mamba but was harmless. She says it was a snake commonly found in our area, that a kid brought in earlier in the week.

Tyrr said, “A few days ago a young gentleman came in and was very proud of his catch and he offered us a rough green snake and I said no thank you. My suspicion is that he decided to leave it here for us and he decided that we were going to adopt it whether we liked it or not.”

Norris isn’t buying it. “This was not a green snake,” she said. “In my opinion the green snakes we see down here are two to three foot long at the most and their slender — this snake was fatter.”

Though the cages look secure, Norris thinks the mamba might have gotten loose at feeding time.

“It is posted on the door that they feed their animals in there at three everyday, so we were in there at four so maybe they didn’t secure the cage good enough after they fed them. I don’t know if they did feel that one, but I see that that’s the only way he could have got out.”

Tyrr says every display is opened with a key, and the workers are trained to always lock the exhibits behind them. As for the missing mamba, Tyrr says Norris couldn’t find him because he was hiding at the top of his cage.

The serpentarium employees say a snake has never gotten out of a display. They say it was just a coincidence that a green snake got in and was found near the mamba display.