Wildlife Removal Expert Removes 17 Snakes from Iowa Home

A wildlife removal expert says she recently encountered “the craziest job” she’s “ever done” — removing over a dozen snakes from a crawl space under an Iowa home. 

On Oct. 20, Kimra Hines, owner of Kritter Kim Wildlife Removal, shared on Facebook how the incident happened, noting that it all began when she received a call about a snake spotted inside an Iowa resident’s home.

Hines recalled that she told the homeowner that “it was unlikely” she would find the snake, who slithered away after it was spotted, “since it had been a few days” but that she could “do an inspection to locate and seal up any entry points in the structure to at least give them some peace of mind.” What Hines found during the inspection shocked her and required more work than sealing entry points.

Hines said the inspection started normal until she “discovered a hole where the siding meets the foundation” near the kitchen. She said she went down to that crawl space under the home to inspect it, noting that it was spacious and “the ground was completely covered with plastic.” During her inspection, she said she began to hear “the plastic moving.”

“‘Hmm. Something is under there,'” Hines said she thought at the time. “I started looking around and saw the plastic move. I recognize that movement. It’s definitely a snake.” 

“I was stoked because I knew the homeowner would be relieved that I actually found a snake and removed it,” she added. “Then I realized there were at least two.”

She said she ran back to her van and got the equipment she needed for snake removal, including “snake tongs, gloves, a bucket, and a trash bag.” After removing the plastic from one corner of the crawlspace, she found “a black snake.” After flipping more of the plastic on the ground, she saw two more reptiles slithering around.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

“There was definitely more than one. I couldn’t believe it,” she recalled on Facebook, alongside a video of her using her snake tongs to remove the animals. “At that point, I realized I was crawling around under a house with an unknown number of snakes.”

The wildlife removal expert said she decided to “search every inch of that crawl space” and another adjacent one to find every potential snake hiding in them. She used her snake tongs to “poke” around the area to make sure that she didn’t hit any snakes while on her “hands and knees.”

“My adrenaline was pumping the entire time, but I was calm and collected. Catch a few, and then get a few more bags ready. Catch a few, get a few more bags ready,” she said.

Hines noted that when she was done, she counted 16 snakes removed from the crawl space and started work on “sealing up holes.” When she went to the back of the home, she said she found an additional snake, bringing the total to 17.

The wildlife removal expert noted that the snakes inside the home had been “rat snakes and blue racers,” while the final snake she found was a “bull snake.” All non-venomous snake species. She added that those types of snakes “den together when they hibernate for the winter” and had found the perfect place under the plastic in the home’s crawl space to stay “insulated.”

“Once I was all finished, my boyfriend and I put all the snakes in a big trash can,” she shared. In a separate Facebook post, she showed a video of all the black and brown patterned snakes slithering around the trash can together. 

“It was what nightmares are made of,” Hines noted.