Snakes and Sh!t

A sickness in the family kept me from doing any cage building or pairing of snakes over the holiday weekend as I had planned. I spent it in the hospital instead.
We’ve got that behind us now though, so I stared pairing a few snakes this week. I’m still holding off on most of them, but I’ve got one female that has copulated a couple of times with a spider, and I have a lemon pastel male with a female now.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be putting more together. I’m going to let the albino male have a week or two to temperature cycle alone  before letting him have any girls. He didn’t show any breeding interest last season, but he was only a little over a year old. I’m hoping he’ll be up to the task this year.

Back to cage building tomorrow. I’m hoping to make some good progress on the new boa cage and maybe even get started on some of the new rodent racks.

Clay :: Nov.29.2007 :: Reptile Related :: No Comments »

I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. May we all remember during this time just how much we as individuals and as a nation as a whole really do have to be thankful for.

We are blessed to live in the greatest country on Earth, to have plenty of food, clothing and life’s other necessities, as well as more luxuries than we could ever use.
It takes only a casual look at much of the rest of the world to make you truly thankful for the things that we all too often take for granted.

Clay :: Nov.22.2007 :: Random Thoughts :: No Comments »

Well, cage building has been suspended for a few days due to my work schedule. I’m working double shifts until Thanksgiving.
I do however get to enjoy a nice four day weekend starting Thursday though, and plan to do some building then if the weather cooperates.

I’ve been working on plans to redesign the rat barn to maximize my production potential should I decide to significantly expand the breeding colonies. This should result in two new rodent rack designs, one to hold the large Van Ness cat litter pans and a variation of the cement tub breeding rack design that is already posted. I’m thinking of a design that will support the tubs from the bottom as opposed to having them suspended on tracks.
I also plan to replace an old melamine rack this winter while I have the colubrids in brumation. This will be a large rack for the 32 quart tubs.
Something needs to be done with  some new shoebox racks too. I have never liked the hatchling rack design I have posted on the site and am wanting to replace those plans with something better.

I think I’ll pair up a few snakes this weekend too. My albino male ball is off feed completely, so I’m hoping he’s developing an interest in breeding this season. So far only one female has started refusing food, all the others are ravenous as they often are just prior to the breeding season.

Clay :: Nov.20.2007 :: The Collection :: No Comments »

I decided to put off starting the breeding season this year. I normally start pairing up the ball pythons in October sometime, and getting to the other pythons later on. I decided to wait until late November at least before I start introductions with the balls and see how that works.

For whatever reason I often see a 50% success rate in female becoming gravid, so I’m going to switch things up a little.
I went through and weighed my potential breeders a few days ago. Looks like I’ll have three more girls I hatched in 2004 that will be ready to join the stable this year.
The het clown female that produced the two awesome clowns for me this year is heavier now than before she was bred last year, so I’m hoping she’ll produce again.

One of my het albino females took this year off, and the other is a big 1900+ grams, so if my albino male decides to cooperate maybe I won’t miss the gene this year.

The spider male is of course ready to go, I think eat and breed is all the spiders are concerned with. He’s over 1100 grams now.  My lemon pastel male has crossed 1000 so maybe he’ll decide he’s ready this year too.
Unfortunately my female pastel isn’t going to be up to size to breed it doesn’t look like, so I might not see bumblebees this year after all.

I’ll be trying the bredli for the first time this season and I’ll be pairing the womas again as well. My woma technique still isn’t worked out completely and I’ve had mixed success in the past. I’m going to work on them again and see if I can get both females to reproduce for me.

We always have much more potential in a given season than we have results though, and I think most breeders understand that all too well. We’ll see in a few months how our plans work out, and as usual we have hopes of a very good season ahead.

Clay :: Nov.13.2007 :: Reptile Related, The Collection :: No Comments »

It’s been a few months since there’s been a new cage design published on the site. Due to the format of my cage plans in that they are not drawings, but photos of the actual build, I can only add plans as I build cages and it’s just not that often that I come up with a new design.

This cage however is a big departure from what I have normally built. It’s going to be the most labor intensive cage I’ve built to date, but I think it’ll be worth it.
I’m looking forward to getting it in use and publishing the build on it. Being an experimental design though, I’m also just hoping that it’s usable once it’s built haha.
Not many people know the specifics of this cage yet, but just for a sneak preview, it’s being built to house large boa constrictors and will be 5 feet wide. My aim is to create a more stimulating environment for the snakes and maximize the opportunity for exercise while not taking up a lot of real estate in the room.

Actual assembly was ready to start yesterday, but I had to quit for the day.  My wife works nights too and I couldn’t fire up the air compressor without waking her up ;).
I’m hoping to get to work on it a bit in the morning before I have to go to bed. I’m still not expecting to have it finished until probably December.

This is the first time I’ve  started construction on a cage without having the entire plan in my head. I hadn’t decided on the type of doors, but right now I’m leaning toward hinged.
I still haven’t fully decided on the heating method either. I wanted to experiment with radiant heat panels, but I’m not sure that is going to happen in time, so I might have to fall back to the flexwatt on this one.

We’ll see how it turns out in the end, but I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks of this project.

Clay :: Nov.11.2007 :: Reptile Related, The Collection :: No Comments »

I am really loving the spider morph of the ball pythons. My male was born in 2005 and he has amazed me with his appetite and feeding habits since he was a hatchling. This season I hatched a couple of daughters from him that are spiders and they have the same unreal feeding response.

From what I have been told by other breeders, the spiders are known for their good appetites. Based on the three I have now, I tend to agree.

Here’s a pic of one of the girls I hatched this year. I decided to just keep both of them.

Clay :: Nov.10.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

You know, 99% of the time I hate to see an article involving people and reptiles in the news. It almost always results in a bad image of herps, and this is yet another example.

Fortunately the snake wasn’t portrayed in nearly as bad a light as it could have been, thanks in part to the fact one of the cops was apparently somewhat knowledgeable about them.
Still, anytime the police are involved in something which also involves a reptile, it’s never good, and this instance just astounds me.

A 17 year old girl was bitten and constricted by a 2-3 foot long ball python, 2-3 FEET! and what do they do? They call the police! I couldn’t believe it when I read it. Why involve the police in something so trivial?

We’re not talking about a large constrictor, nothing that snake could have done would have endangered the girl in any way, but yet the police were called, which of course got the media involved.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve been snake bitten. I’ve been constricted by a number of smaller species as well, including ball pythons, but never did the idea of calling anyone, let alone the police, ever so much as cross my mind.

Every time something stupid like this happens and finds it’s way to the news media, it does just a little more damage to our hobby as a whole. It give just another bit of ammunition to those who desire to completely take away our ability to legally keep these animals.

This girl should have done us all a favor and stuck to keeping hamsters if she is no better prepared to deal with something as simple as a bite from a ball python.
It seems that every couple of months we are seeing yet another state or community proposing a ban on the keeping of snakes. Generally it’s an ill-worded piece of legislation which calls for a ban on “constrictors”, or some other similar wide ranging blanket legislation. Every time our reptiles are shown in an unfavorable light in the news, I always think, will this city be next on the list? How many more local civic leaders will be called upon to enact another piece of knee jerk legislation?

For the whole story see this link http://tinyurl.com/26bez6

Clay :: Nov.10.2007 :: Herp News :: No Comments »

I rode down to Columbia last Saturday for the show. I haven’t been much of a show goer for the last few years, I think it was spring of 2006 since I’d been to one.

It was a good trip, the show was moderately good, not a lot there that interested me. I mainly went to see the eyelash vipers that David Kornerly was bringing. He had some outstanding specimens, and I enjoyed talking with him a few minutes.

I did pick up another addition to my lepidus group, a Davis Mountains locality male. Click the thumbnail below for a bigger pic of him.

It was worth the trip, since I hadn’t been to a show in so long, and better than the average Raleigh show these days.

Clay :: Nov.08.2007 :: Reptile Related, The Collection :: 1 Comment »

I’ve been enjoying a new venture from Larry Suttles and BT called Reptile Radio. The show airs on BlogTalkRaido.com every Saturday night at midnight EST.

His latest guest was Brian Barczyk of BHB Reptiles. Brian will be returning this Saturday for part 2 of his talk.
You can listen to the show live or listen to past shows at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/reptileradio

Clay :: Nov.07.2007 :: Reptile Related :: No Comments »

Welcome to the blog/journal/random meanderings part of the website.
I took a shot at the blog thing once before, two or three of you might have actually seen it. The problem was I just didn’t have much to say, and I doubted if anyone was interested if I did, so after a month or so I gave it up. No one seemed to notice, so I didn’t think much more of it.

I got to thinking recently though about how I occasionally have a few things that I’d like to announce, or a tidbit worth showing every one but not really worth a dedicated page on the site. I decided that might actually be a good use for a blog type journal.

Most of what you’ll see here will probably be in some way reptile related, but pretty much anything will be potential fodder for these posts.
I’ll announce additions to the site here, updates on the breeding season, and most anything else that interests me at that particular time.

Feel free to comment, assuming I have this thing configured properly.

Clay :: Nov.06.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »