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boas only goes back to 1999, but there are undocumented reports of boas dating back to the ’70s. At some point it must have been a release or escape. This is the only known breeding population of boas in the United States.”
    They offer to show me the female boa, so we head into the estate through a gated entrance off Southwest 152nd Street. As we drive in along a bumpy track, I notice that there are homes all along the estate boundary. Dallas says the boas have troubled the residents from time to time. “We had an unfortunate incident a couple of years ago,” he says. “There was a neighbor over here, and one of the guards found this dead big tomcat and a dead boa lying right next to each other. The boa had strangled the cat, but in the process the cat had bit up the snake so bad that it died from its wounds.
    â€œThe neighbor was putting up signs with a picture saying ‘Here’s my missing cat, call us if you find him.’ Someone had to call her to tell her. She was very upset.”
    We drive deeper into the forest, the road bordered on either side by dense vegetation punctuated by spindly paurotis palm trees. We stop close to the boa’s last recorded location. Jane opens the trunk of the truck and pulls out a large electronic box and a handheld aerial, not unlike an old-fashioned rooftop TV aerial. She plugs theaerial into the box, holds the aerial up, and twists a dial on the box. She turns to face the tangle of bushes and the box goes
bip, bip, bip.
“This way,” she says.
    We follow her into the forest, fighting with vines that snag our feet as we push through the foliage.
Bip, bip, bip
goes the tracker. We press deeper and deeper into the undergrowth, dodging poison ivy as we go. The bip, bip,
bip
of the tracker seems to get louder with every step.
    Adrian Diaz, the Miami-Dade County Animal Services investigator who is with us, asks Dallas if he can pick up the snake when we find her. “No, we don’t want to disturb them. We want them to go about much as they naturally do. We don’t touch them,” says Dallas.
    Adrian looks a little disappointed. On the way here he was telling me about his lifelong love of snakes. “As a kid I was never afraid to catch the little corn snakes and garden snakes. Never been afraid—there’s just something about them,” he explained. “At one point I had them at home and everything. I had a blood python, two Burmese pythons, green tree boas, all sorts of stuff. My wife obviously put an end to that quick.”
    Bip-bip-bip.
It’s definitely getting louder.
    Around this point it strikes me that before this moment I’ve never seen a snake outside a zoo. My encounter with the Phoenix rattlesnake is yet to come. I vaguely remember seeing a tail of an adder, Britain’s only venomous snake, disappearing into a bush as a kid—or, at least, I think I saw it. In fact, thinking about it again, I was probably just told there were adders there and imagined the rest.
    Besides, adders are cowardly snakes, more likely to flee before you find them than bite. Now I’m about to come face-to-face with a wild boa constrictor. I hope I don’t panic.
    Bip-bip-bip.
It’s definitely louder.
Bip-bip-bip.
And more frequent. It’s starting to feel like the scene in the movie
Alien
where they search the spaceship for the monster using motion trackers. I glanceat the palm trees. What if it’s in a tree? Boas are capable climbers, I think to myself.
    Jane walks forward then turns and moves back.
Bip-bip-bip.
She does a U-turn and moves forward again and then back again.
Bip-bip-bip.
“If there’s a burrow here it should be on the ground,” says Dallas.
    We stare at the ground at our feet. Jane moves back and forth, back and forth. It’s definitely here. Right here.
Bip-bip-bip.
A few tense seconds pass, and then the snake slips out from the undergrowth right by our feet, slithering as fast