DES MOINES, Iowa — Barbara Miller, a Waterbury Neighborhood resident, posted signs around her neighborhood after she saw a 6-foot-long python in her backyard.

Miller couldn’t believe her eyes when she first saw the snake.

“I was doing dishes at my kitchen sink, and I looked out in the backyard and on my hemlock bushes, there was a kind of a lemon-yellow circular stick, I thought. And I told myself it was a stick,” Miller said.

When Miller turned to look back at the snake it was gone.

“I turned away for just a minute and looked back, and it was gone. And I thought, it can’t be a stick. So then it went out on my second-story deck and looked down, and there was no sign of any sticks. So I kind of rethought what I had seen, and I realized it had the shape of a snake,” Miller said.

Miller called animal control after her sighting.

“I later called animal Control, and by then it had I couldn’t see it anymore. And they said if I found it again to call. So that’s what I plan to do. I still haven’t seen it again” Miller said.

Miller placed a flyer on a telephone pole in her neighborhood to warn neighbors.

“So I tried to do what I could do to alert the neighbors because it can’t hurt people and you don’t want to crawl in your doggy door or anywhere else your garage either,” Miller said.

Jay Tetzloff, the Chief Animal Officer at the Blank Park Zoo, said that based on the description Miller gave of the snake, it was likely an albino python. Tetzloff said that an albino python could survive temporarily in Iowa during the summer months if it learned to hunt.

“If it learns how to hunt, So that’s probably the key is if some hobby snakes or pet snakes may not know how to hunt mate, that might be a challenge for it. But if there’s a food source, which it probably is, there’s enough ground squirrels, rabbits, mice, rats around, I would think it could survive on that if it has the ability to to find it and catch prey,” Tetzloff said.

Tetzloff said that the snake would not survive the winter.

“If it’s out outside right now, it’s okay. But as we get into winter, it’s not gonna survive the winter here in Iowa.” Tetzloff said.

According to Iowa law, it is illegal to own a pet python.