Baltimore Water Wheel Helps Ball Python Get Home

Baltimore’s water wheel, which collects trash in the Inner Harbor, has made its strangest catch to date, according to Adam Lindquist, manager of the Waterfront Partnership, which helps oversee the contraption.

Powered by sunlight and water, the water wheel rakes in trash through booms placed in the harbor, items that are ferried up a conveyor belt and transferred into a dumpster.

Lindquist and the owner over the water wheel first saw a snake had slithered aboard around midnight Wednesday while watching a web cam to find what the trash wheel had scooped up after a storm, The Baltimore Sun reported.

“This is the most unusual thing we have picked up,” Lindquist said of the ball python that ended up curling up on the water wheel’s solar control box.

“This is weirder than the keg of beer,” he added, in a video of the snake extraction he posted on YouTube.

National Aquarium General Curator Jack Cover (who added “snake wrangler” to his title) was called in Wednesday to detach the ball python.

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According to Cover, the snake was “basking” on the solar box, since the coldblooded animal likes to get warmth where it can.

“It was really having a good time there,” Cover said of the adult African snake, which he said was toasty.

The snake was probably someone’s pet that got loose, traveling into the Jones Falls and then the trash wheel, according to Cover.

As of Thursday, the National Aquarium reports the python is slated to get a new family.

“The python is going to a good home!” the National Aquarium reported Thursday on its Facebook page. “A member of the Healthy Harbor staff is an experienced snake owner.”

Pictured, the National Aquarium’s Jack Cover extracts the ball python from the Baltimore water wheel. Screenshot from video by Adam Lindquist/YouTube.