Thursday Morning: The Old Rack in Reptile Room 2

With the mornings getting lighter and lighter, I just plain can't sleep until the alarm goes off. And rather than just lying in bed and thinking "gee, I wish I could go back to sleep"....

I've checked on the fifteen corn snake eggs in my half-assed incubator (it consists of a plastic tub, no airholes, three-quarters full of damp vermiculite, sitting at the back of a shelf in the back-heated home-built rack) and the ones at the top are all showing a lovely rose-pink glow when you shine a flashlight sideways through them. Candling them and seeing that rose glow means that there's something in them... that the egg was fertile. A yellow glow usually means that the egg is an infertile dud and won't hatch - but because corn snake eggs stick together when they're first laid, I wouldn't actually try to take out the infertile ones.

Then on to cleaning cages and feeding. Just four this morning - it's about all I can do before I have to get ready for work properly, and one of them makes THAT take longer.

Il Palazzo, my hybrid cornsnake/Japanese ratsnake, is the easiest. Top up the water bowl, spot check for poo and remove, and wave a prekilled or frozen/thawed fuzzy rat in his direction. He's genuinely lovely as a snake - sort of a caramel brown with saddle blotches at the front (I think he got this from his Pantherophis guttattus mum) going to a blue-green narrowly banded saddle pattern at the back (this came from his Elaphe climacophora dad). I'm expecting him to grow a bit more - he's only about three feet long now and five isn't out of the question for what he is. It's fascinating that an Old World species can crossbreed successfully with a New World one... at least he doesn't look anything like either parent, so he can't really be mistaken for either one. Hybrids that look like hybrids are fine by me; I'm not as happy with cryptic ones that look like one of the parent species.

Next is Cerastes, our whitesided Texas rat snake (Pantherophis obsoletus lindheimeri). He's also still just a baby, and thus far though he is a jumpy little beggar he is not snappy or inclined to strike at anything other than his food. He looks like someone only half-painted him - or as though he crawled through whitewash at some point. He got two multimammate rat fluffs this morning - they're an African rodent about halfway between the size of a mouse and a rat, easy to breed but oh they bite like buggers. My finger's still sore from the one who got me on Tuesday night, right up under the fingernail.

Nutmeg is a young juvenile African house snake - we suspect he's Lamprophis maculata, the Dotted house snake - who is deep rich brown, almost black. His breakfast was a tiny multimammate fuzzy which he rather ignored - I expect it'll be gone when I get home.

And last but definitely not least was Sierra. Sierra is an amelanistic striped Lampropeltis getulus californiae. This can be translated into English as Tail-Rattling Musk-and-Crap Machine. Or California Kingsnake, if you prefer. She uses her tail to fling musk, poo and urates all over ANYONE who attempts to pick her up. And though I appear unable to smell snake musk (which is supposedly a blessing) it is meant to smell of garlic and nastiness. I dunno - I can't smell it. I wonder if my coworkers can? She was busily tailrattling at the fluffy rat when I left her.

Now, since this blog doesn't have "geographic markers" as such unless you pick up a few spellings here and there, I'm in the UK; over here live feeding isn't well thought of nor is it completely legal if you're doing it for shits and giggles. I don't live feed anything that won't starve to death unless I do... everyone who WILL eat dead prey gets dead prey, whether it be freshly humanely euthanised (I use CO2) or thawed out frozen storebought. Please, if you think it'd be cool to feed live... remember that rats and mice can and do bite if they're scared, and that your snake is pretty stupid compared to a rat. If the rat CAN get the advantage it will, and a rat can maim or kill even a boa or python.