The McWetlog

Modern snakes raid nests all the time, looking to make a meal of everything from bird and reptile eggs to baby rodents. It looks like they’ve been doing this for a while, if this fossil of a snake raiding a dinosaur nest is any indication. The 3.5-metre snake, a newly described species called Sanajeh indicus, was raiding a titanosaur nest 67 million years ago. Being sauropod dinosaurs, titanosaurs were quite large (some exceeded 100 tons), but the fossil titanosaur hatchling is only half a metre long, and quite manageable for a snake of Sanajeh’s size. The fossil was originally unearthed in 1984, but it was only later that the snake’s skeleton was identified for what it was — an intruder! — rather than more bones from a long-necked sauropod. (The article also discusses Sanajeh’s place in snake evolution, particularly in terms of the development of wide gapes.) Summary at New Scientist; via Clint.

Previously: Titanoboa, terror of the Eocene.

I’ve since heard from the owner of the Gaboon viper that was seized in Toronto last week, who wrote to explain the situation from their point of view and their background and philosophy with respect to venomous snake keeping. I wrote back to say good luck sorting everything out, but also that I didn’t agree with keeping venomous snakes in an apartment in a large city.

Even though I think venomous snakes are very interesting, and have several friends and acquaintances who keep venomous snakes (“hot” snakes or “hots,” in herpers’ jargon), I will never keep any myself. Here are my reasons why.

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In Toronto yesterday, police responding to a noise complaint found a Gaboon viper in an apartment. Here’s the twist: the viper was being kept by the person making the complaint — the cops stopped by as part of the investigation. Of course, keeping venomous snakes is illegal in Toronto, so things happened, and the snake has been surrendered to the Toronto Zoo.

Moral: if you keep illegal animals, you may want to think twice about calling the cops. Or at the very least, you might want to keep your ferociously venomous snake discreetly out of view.

At least the snake wasn’t loose, like a certain cobra three years ago.

Many people who want to get a pet snake find the idea of snake keeping a bit intimidating. This feeling isn’t helped when, as they surf the Web and read the pet manuals, they learn all the things that can go wrong with a pet snake. The health problems alone are enough to scare anyone stiff: mites and ticks, internal parasites, mouth rot. They may panic at the idea of shedding problems or wonder whether a cage is escape-proof. They worry about getting things just right: how much and how often the snake needs to be fed, the exact temperature of the cage.

If this sounds a bit neurotic, you’re probably right. The people who worry to death are the people who ask questions — so they’re the people I hear from. The people who don’t worry, the people who buy a snake without doing their homework — I don’t hear from them at all, and I don’t think very much of them either. Given a choice, I’d rather that they worry too much than not enough.

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A road project in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata may threaten a population of Blanding’s Turtles in the area, the Ottawa Citizen reports; herpetologists are using frankly apocalyptic language to describe the impact of the Terry Fox Drive extension on the local turtles. There’s a rush on to get the extension built before March 2011 to qualify for federal stimulus funding. On the other hand, the turtles, which are listed as a threatened species, should come under the protection of the provincial Endangered Species Act, under which destroying habitat is a distinct no-no.

Here’s a map of the Terry Fox Drive extension:

The area inside the road’s arc will be developed; outside the arc, the land will be left in its natural state.

Ottawa is a surprisingly good place for turtles, which are still found in awfully built-up areas of the city (see, for example, Michelle Tribe’s photo of a Blanding’s Turtle at Mud Lake, right). They also get quite a bit of positive press, thanks in no small part to a local turtle rescue that pioneered the use of turtle crossing signs. Hopefully, road mortality won’t wipe them out — which is precisely the worry about the Terry Fox Drive extension.

Update, Nov. 25 at 6:05 PM:

Yesterday’s Citizen suggests that the project is going to go ahead anyway, with much mitigation work promised.

The $47.7-million Terry Fox Drive extension should go ahead next spring, despite concerns raised over the threatened Blanding’s turtle, said Kanata North Councillor Marianne Wilkinson, whose ward includes the proposed project. …

“The road is already needed. The road is going to come anyways. Is waiting two years going to make a difference? I suspect not,” Wilkinson said. “If they do that, that will cost the city $46 million because we will not get the federal and provincial money. We lose the funding, we still get the road.”

So apparently it’s a fait accompli, even before construction begins — and this in a city that takes decades to build anything. (How come interprovincial bridges and light rail don’t work this quickly?)

Bob writes, “I just heard the debate on KQED’s Forum regarding the Sharp Park Golf Course. One of the speakers said that cats may be the principle killer of the [San Francisco Garter] Snake. Do you know if this is a valid statement and if so what is being done to stop the cats?”

Bob’s referring to the debate over Sharp Park, a golf course owned by the City of San Francisco (but is located in nearby Pacifica) that serves as habitat for the endangered San Francisco garter; I covered the story on Gartersnake.info here and here.

But he’s also talking about the impact that feral and domestic cats have on local wildife populations, which has been an increasing concern among conservationists. No matter how tame, cats are born hunters; if left outside, they will do what they do best. And with 100 million cats in the United States alone, that adds up to a lot of dead wildlife. From the fact sheet Facts on Cats and Wildlife: A Conservation Dilemma:

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So last night, our male Okeetee corn snake decided, while being handled as his cage was being changed, that Jennifer’s hand looked awfully delicious …

What you see above is a feeding bite: he clamped on and did not let go. (Not voluntarily, anyway — it took some doing.) A defensive bite would have been a quick jab-and-release.

He did manage to draw blood, but as wounds go, this was pretty superficial — to the point where my first response to Jen’s announcement that he was biting her was to run and grab the camera. I know: I’m a real sweetheart. But if that doesn’t put a bite from a nonvenomous snake into perspective, I don’t know what will.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook will know that we had a bit of a scare last week with one of our snakes: our female Red-sided Garter Snake — one of the litter of 42 born in June 2002 — threw up her meal on Wednesday night and was looking very poorly on Thursday: limp, listless and very unresponsive when handled. We separated her from her cagemate (a female Blue-striped Garter Snake) and waited to see what would happen. (Frankly, we had no idea what, if anything, was wrong with her. Throw-ups happen, but we’d never seen a snake go downhill like that after one.) Fortunately, she looked much better on Friday, and by the time we got back from our weekend trip to Toronto earlier this evening, she was back to her old self — which is to say, like her siblings (we still have two of her brothers), very active and very curious.

Black is beautiful — especially when it comes to our animals. So many people have a special fondness for black animals — black cats, black Labs, black horses (why else would two major children’s book series about horses be about black horses?) — and snakes are no exception. Check a reptile discussion board, and sooner or later you’ll find someone who’s looking for a solid black snake; earlier this year, one of my friends went positively gaga over the notion of laying hands on a black snake. This entry is for them: I’m going to go over the black snakes most commonly seen in the pet trade.

As far as black snakes are concerned, the gold standard is, without question, the Eastern Indigo Snake (Drymarchon corais couperi). A big, heavy-bodied snake with glossy, iridescent scales, the eastern indigo is the largest snake north of Mexico. While they will generally gobble down anything they can, they’re surprisingly docile with human beings, so much so that they have a reputation for being one of the tamest snakes in the world. (On the other hand, I’m told that an indigo bite, on those rare occasions it does occur, is unforgettable. Indigos aren’t constrictors; they bite hard.)

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A Scarborough man with 13 prior convictions under the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act — he still owes $27,000 in fines — has been sentenced to 106 days in jail for turtle poaching. In 2007, wildlife officers nabbed Pak Sun Chung with 26 Blanding’s Turtles and a Spotted Turtle near Sarnia; he’d caught them at the nearby Walpole Island First Nation. “It was unclear,” says the Toronto Star’s Iain Marlow, “whether the animals were destined for the underground pet or restaurant trades.” It’s unclear to me whether that level of chronic poaching has any real economic motive or business plan behind it — it feels like the wildlife equivalent of shoplifting.

My Baird’s rat snake is apparently something of an escape artist. On October 12, 2002, I found him in my bathroom; he’d managed to muscle his way out of his cage thanks to loose knobs on the lid. And now he’s done it again: this morning, right in front of me, he managed to find a weakness in his lid and very nearly got out of his cage — as you can see in the poor shot I took above (I was working fast for obvious reasons). Now, I’m not entirely sure how he did this: I thought those snap-on grille lids were escape-proof, but clearly there was a weak point somewhere (possibly in the middle). I’ve weighted the lid down for now, but a more secure solution is no doubt required.

I’ve had a few snakes escape on me before, but not very often — the last time was, in fact, the October 2002 incident with this very snake. And I’ve never had an escape where I’ve lost the snake; I’ve always caught the snake in the act, or found the snake hanging around where it shouldn’t be. In other words, I’ve been a lucky bastard.

George is still not dead, but he’s getting increasingly, well, incontinent. You will recall that our male Plains Garter Snake (Thamnophis radix) was rather floppy; in fact, he seemed to be using his front half to drag his back half along like a wagon, as though he’d suffered some nerve damage that prevented the full use of his muscles back there. It seems to be getting worse: now his poop is having trouble clearing the vent, and he’s usually so twisted around back there that he, um, shits himself and needs to be cleaned up. George apparently needs some Depends, though I don’t think they come in his size.

He still eats well and has a good disposition. Go figure.

Our female bullsnake, Lucy, laid four eggs yesterday, but I do not have high hopes for them: they look rather yellowish and are probably not fertile. (Par for the course.) I expect they’ll collapse fairly soon, but we’ll keep them in the incubator for a while, in case I’m wrong.

I’ve added still more photos to my Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo set; we visited that zoo again on Saturday. Highlights of this trip included some extraordinarily personable marmosets (which weren’t there the last time), an unlabelled mamba, and, found outside the building, a gravid Northern Red-bellied Snake.

Previously: More fun at Little Ray’s.

I expected that the size of our reptile collection would shrink through attrition, but I expected it to be a result of snakes succumbing to old age (some of the garter snakes are starting to get up there, for example). I did not expect to find the male Cape Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer vertebralis) dead in his cage this morning, from unknown causes. He was the youngest snake in our collection and our most recent acquisition; we acquired him in November 2007 (the picture above dates from that time).

This isn’t just an unexpected shock; it’s annoying. Pituophis are so robust, you don’t expect anything like this to happen: we’ve kept four pairs of them and raised an additional five babies, and this is the first loss we’ve had of this genus, ever.

Meanwhile, George is still not dead (previously).

It’s been about a month, so we’ve separated our breeding pair of checkered garter snakes. The albino male is now back in his old cage. If they were going to breed this year, they would have done so by now; most of the tell-tale mating behaviour occurred in the first week or so. There is now no longer any point in risking a cannibalism incident, though they do seem to have been getting along rather well. For all I know they’ve already mated — they may just have been more subtle than some garter snakes I’ve known.

On September 18, 1968, the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft orbited the Moon and returned safely to the Earth; it was one reason behind NASA’s decision to change Apollo 8’s flight into the first manned spaceflight to orbit the Moon.

Zond 5 was an unmanned spacecraft, but it was not uninhabited: “A biological payload of turtles, wine flies, meal worms, plants, seeds, bacteria, and other living matter was included in the flight. … It was announced that the turtles (steppe tortoises) had lost about 10% of their body weight but remained active and showed no loss of appetite.” That’s right: the first vertebrates to visit the Moon were Russian Tortoises (Testudo horsfieldii). They apparently survived their trip (unlike Laika); I wonder if they’re still around — they’re tortoises, after all.

More on the Soviet Zond program.

We’ve decided to part with a couple of snakes that we’ve had for a few years. The following snakes are now listed on the price list page:

1. A male leucistic Texas rat snake, born in 2005; he’s jumpy and feisty as only young rat snakes can be, but will probably settle down in the hands of someone whose attention is spread across fewer snakes. He started out as a problem feeder but now has one of the most voracious appetites in our collection. $120.
2. A female red milk snake, born in 2002. She was originally acquired as part of a breeding pair that turned out to be two females. Small and gentle, she’s still eating fuzzy mice. This subspecies of milk snake isn’t commonly seen in captivity. $180.

Let me know if you’re interested. Local sales only! And be sure to consult the reptile FAQ and terms and conditions before contacting me.

The trinket snake died this afternoon. You may recall my entry last February in which I described how she was bleeding and shedding her skin at the same time. Despite our attempts at treatment, an eventual second shed was just as bloody as the first; by that time, it was almost certainly too late to do anything else.

Don’t get your hopes up: we haven’t had snakes breed successfully since 2005. But this afternoon we introduced our albino male checkered garter snake to the larger of our two females, in hopes of some ophidian bouncy-bouncy. So far there is no bad news: his flick rate went through the roof and he began courtship behaviour; she, for her part, has not yet killed and eaten him. Garter snake courtship can take a while — weeks, even — so it’s too early to tell if it’s successful. And even post-copulation, it will depend on the viability of his sperm, whether she’s ovulating, and so forth. If all goes well, we should have a small litter of albino and normal checkered garters some time in the summer; the trick is that a lot of things have to go well for that to happen. Cross your fingers.

The Province reported last week that the British Columbia government has announced new restrictions on the keeping of exotic animals deemed dangerous to the public. Here is the list of banned species. The list of mammals is lengthy: primates, foxes and wolves, wild cats, bears, hyenas, elephants, rhinos, hippos, giraffes, and African buffalo. As for birds, they’re banning cassowaries, which attack (and have killed) people. Three species of poison frog are also banned, none from the commonly kept genus Dendrobates. The reptiles that are banned are exactly the ones that are banned in Toronto: all venomous reptiles, all crocodilians, boas and pythons over three metres and monitor lizards over two metres.

It’s very hard to argue against this list. It’s been my position that keeping exotic animals in captivity should be permitted so long as the following criteria can be met:

1. Keeping the animal does not pose a risk to public safety or to the health and safety of the keeper or their family.
2. The keeper is able to provide proper care for the animal (this covers both individual competence and whether it’s even possible to keep this thing alive in captivity).
3. The animal is not an endangered or threatened species; the survival of the species is not adversely affected by its popularity as an exotic pet.

The animals the B.C. government is prohibiting fail criteria number one, which is kind of fundamental. We’ve so often had to deal with arbitrary restrictions on exotic pets that seem to defy logic, bans on animals that are harmless, gentle, easy to care for and prolific in the wild, but that happen to be reptiles, so they’re out. This is not one of those times, and I’m not going to the barricades over this one.

Jennifer discovered something freakish with our trinket snake last night: as she was shedding her skin, she was bleeding, at the midsection and further down the tail. Closer examination revealed a sizeable wound along the midsection, but I’m unable to figure out what caused it; we went over her cage very carefully and found nothing she scraped against. The blood is light in colour, suggesting that it’s capillary blood.

More perplexingly, the bleeding seems to have occurred between the two layers of skin. (When snakes shed, they secrete a fluid to separate the old layer of skin from the new layer; that’s why their skin seems so dull and their eyes go milky white during this process.) Her tail remains unshed; there’s blood underneath the unshed skin (you’ll see it in the larger versions of this photo).

Jennifer examined a skin-and-blood sample under the microscope but couldn’t find any evidence of microbial infection. We’ve got her in a different, clean cage and we’re applying antibiotic ointment; if this isn’t an injury, it may well be a bacterial or fungal infection. The snake is still ambulatory and alert, but without as much muscle tension as she used to have; she’s probably quite sore, if nothing else.

All in all, we’re a bit perplexed, and wondering what will happen next.

When floods ravage the northeastern Australian state of Queensland (at the same time that fires are clobbering Victoria), sweeping crocodiles and venomous snakes into residential areas, local residents worry about the well-being of the crocodiles — even when one snatches a five-year-old boy:

A five-year-old boy was snatched by a four-metre-long crocodile while out walking on Sunday and is feared dead. … Several other crocodiles were spotted around the Gulf of Carpentaria late last week, and one was run over by a car in the city of Townsville.

Local residents aren’t taking their frustration out on the reptiles, though. The injured crocodile is being nursed back to health after suffering cuts and bruises, while the parents of five-year-old Jeremy Doble have asked authorities not to harm crocodiles caught in traps near where their son disappeared.

Wow. Just, wow.

More photos have been added to my Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo set; we visited the zoo again on December 20, 2008 (yes, it’s once again taken me forever to process and post photos). Highlights include Jennifer playing with tarantulas and tokay geckos, Nicole playing with reticulated pythons and albino skunks, and tortoises, um, playing with each other. (Interesting thing about that last one: both tortoises were male.) Enjoy!

If you think a green anaconda or a reticulated python is too large for comfort, be glad you didn’t live 60 million years ago. Then you would have had to deal with Titanoboa cerrejonensis. While modern snakes max out at 10 or 11 metres in length, Titanoboa is estimated to have been a mind-boggling 13 metres long and to have weighed more than a ton. The fossil boa was discovered in a coal mine in northeastern Colombia, and is described in this week’s issue of Nature. As usual with fossil snakes, we’re dealing with fossil vertebrae, not a complete skeleton. National Geographic News, National Science Foundation, Newsweek Lab Notes.

Apart from the fact that as a big fricking fossil snake, Titanoboa is inherently cool, it also has something to say about how warm the Earth was during the Eocene. Temperature imposes an upper size limit on cold-blooded animals. For Titanoboa to survive, it would have needed temperatures three to six degrees warmer than are currently found in modern-day Colombia. So this snake may have an answer to the question of what happens when the Earth warms up: Do the tropics stay relatively stable while the temperate zones heat up, or do the tropics get hotter too? Titanoboa suggests the latter.

(Art credit: Jason Bourque, University of Florida.)

So I went back to the CNAH website to see what changes have been in the offing in terms of snake taxonomy, because, if you know the CNAH, there will be a whole bunch of changes, some of which will leave you scratching your head. But, even knowing that, I was absolutely flummoxed by what’s been happening to the taxonomy of North American rat snakes over the last five or six years.

When I last checked, there was a Russian research paper that tried to reassign snakes of the notoriously polyphyletic genus Elaphe into new genera; North American Elaphe — corn, rat and fox snakes — were assigned to Pantherophis, with one Central American species going to Pseudelaphe. (Prior to that, three former Elaphe species had been split off into Bogertophis and Senticolis, but this is not considered to be controversial.)

But that’s really only step three (or so) of the massive amount of species renaming and reassigning that has been inflicted on North American corn, rat and fox snakes over the past two decades. Ready? Here we go.

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Every winter, there’s always a chance that one or more snakes will decide it’s hibernation time and that refusing to eat would be an awfully good idea. (This can be triggered by less ambient light and cooler temperatures, even if their cages are heated.) This year, it was the turn of our 8½-year-old male Baird’s Rat Snake, who skipped two successive feedings. Normally, skipping a meal every now and then isn’t a big deal for a snake, even when they only get fed every week or two, so we weren’t overly concerned. Since his cage is in my office, he’s been easy to keep an eye on. He was probably in hibernation mode, since we often saw him soaking in his water dish (as he was in the above picture, taken on December 15), which is something snakes trying to hibernate tend to do. Anyway, he ate again today, so he really didn’t give us much of a chance to start worrying.

(What’s more worrisome is that even though I got him in June 2000, when he was all of a month old, I still haven’t gotten around to naming him yet — “the Baird’s” is usually enough when you’ve only got one of that species. One thought was to call him “Spencer,” after Spencer Fullerton Baird, after whom the species was named, but I didn’t convince myself.)

I’ve been tinkering with my home page today, taking care of little things that have lain fallow for too long. In doing so, I’ve noticed that I haven’t said anything about our snake collection since July. High time I rectified that. Let me tell you about George.

George, you may remember, is our male Plains Garter Snake (Thamnophis radix). We got him in February 2004, which means that we’ve had him for nearly five years. Frankly, I didn’t expect him to last this long: I mentioned two years ago this month that he had a subcutaneous lump that I assumed was a roundworm infestation, and he’s had a big lump just past his vent for years. To be honest, I’ve been expecting him to drop dead any day now for the past two years. If I’d had anything to say about him, it would go something like this: “George: still not dead.”

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So one of Jennifer’s co-workers gave our phone number to one of her friends, who just called to ask if he could bring his granddaughter to visit the snakes.

I don’t know what gave her co-worker the right to do such a thing. It’s as if she had a swimming pool, and I invited my friends to swim in it.

I mention this in my reptile FAQ, and it seems I’m going to have to be more explicit about this from now on: we’re not a zoo. You don’t have the right to so much as ask to see our reptile collection, because you’re essentially trying to invite yourself into our private home. It’s especially inappropriate if, as is often the case, we haven’t met — or you’re calling us because a friend, or a friend of a friend, gave you our number.

If you’re a friend of ours and have a nephew or granddaughter who’s interested in snakes, we’ll probably give you an invitation. But it has to come from us, and be on our terms. If friends start passing out our number without our permission, they won’t be friends for much longer. And if co-workers start doing it, there will be consequences in that arena, I promise you.

We do not let strangers into our home — and for good reason: we’ve even been robbed by a delivery guy. And while we’re happy to teach people about snakes, we draw the line at letting strangers into our home to do it.

Especially when it’s clear that what people really want is a free one-on-one tour. Little Ray’s costs $10, and if you want that level of one-on-one attention, pony up for a birthday party or something. I’m sorry, but our time is valuable — we each bill at around $30 an hour — and it belongs to us.

When you go against the supposed rules and keep snakes two to a cage, you start accumulating anecdotal evidence about how snakes interact with one another. For the most part, a snake encountering another snake will either (1) eat it, (2) fuck it, or (3) ignore it. I do my best to avoid number one and keep breeding pairs together in hopes of number two; it’s number three that gets interesting, particularly in the cases of our four same-sex pairs of compatible rat and garter snakes.

Many snake keepers have observed that a pair or trio of snakes will invariably hide in the same hide box, even if there are other, unoccupied hide boxes available. In other words, even when there’s plenty of room and plenty of places to hide, you’ll usually find two snakes curled up together. Forget about any ideas of snuggling or affection: that’s anthropomorphic thinking; as far as we know, snakes haven’t got the cognitive ability for that level of emotional interaction. What might be happening is one of the following: (1) two or more snakes independently conclude that a given spot is the perfect place to be right now, and they’re not put off by the presence of another snake; (2) the presence of another snake is confirmation that a given spot is a good one; or (3) the presence of another snake is reassuring and safe.

It’s probably number one, though numbers two and three are intriguing. Snakes aggregate in the wild when good locations are scarce: Timber Rattlesnakes bask communally at good sites; northern species of every sort hibernate together in mass hibernation dens because safe places to hibernate aren’t easy to come by at those latitudes (this is the reason behind the Manitoba garter snake dens). I can’t help but wonder if the presence of other snakes has any impact on a snake’s decision making (“this must be the right spot if you guys are here”).

When people find out we have both cats and snakes, they ask whether the two kinds of animals get along. If the snakes ever got out — and I haven’t had an escape in almost six years — the cats would almost certainly make quick work of them. But through the glass, it’s a little different.

Kittens are extremely interested in snakes, and will examine them at close range. Goober, when young, sat on a lot of cage lids, which required us to upgrade them to something stronger (he broke the 50-gallon tank lid, which is now held together with fishing line; fortunately, the box turtle it now houses is not much of an escape risk). And snakes that have never once bitten a human being, such as Trouser (our male anerythristic Corn Snake) and the Baird’s Rat Snake, were striking at him as he watched. After a while, though, he grew out of it; adult cats (at least the ones we’ve had) aren’t as interested.

But now it’s Doofus’s turn to harass and bother the snakes, who are now freaking out at him …

Since we last talked, our reptile collection has shrunk by 20 percent.

A few weeks ago, Jennifer and I bundled up seven snakes and delivered them to their new homes. Jeff and Jenny took our pair of Great Basin Gopher Snakes, the female Western Hognose Snake, Snuggles the Boa Constrictor, the Rosy Boa, and Sam the Ball Python; Stewart got one of our Red Milk Snakes (which promptly turned into a biting machine). With Piss-Boy’s death last month, that brings us down to 32 snakes; further downsizing and expected mortality (I have some old snakes) will take that number down even more in the coming months.

We decided to do this after a lot of careful soul-searching on my part after the embarrassing town council meeting. While we were never ordered to give up any animals, much less the boas and python, it forced me to think a lot harder about what we were keeping, and why. This is what I came up with:

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I named him “Piss-Boy,” awkwardly, after a character in History of the World, Part I: one day shortly after I got him, I noticed he’d soiled his cage four times in the six hours since I had last cleaned it. It always made it problematic to use him in reptile shows, when kids would ask what his name was.

He was an adult male Red-sided Garter Snake, one of four Jeff brought in for me in early 2000, along with two Wandering Garter Snakes (one of which, Extrovert, I still have) and a Checkered Garter Snake that died later the same year from an internal parasitic infection. May 12, 2000: that’s when I took possession. He was at least three years old at the time; fully grown. I don’t think he’s done any growing since then: his metabolism was geared for activity and reproduction.

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My presentation in front of the town council tonight might have gone better if I had known beforehand the origins of the list of banned animals — and if I’d known that the current (circa 2005) by-law also prohibits boas and pythons. Oh, hell. I still think I did all right in front of somewhat skeptical councillors, but I would have liked to have done better.

The bottom line is that there will not be any limits on animals other than dogs and cats, but they’ll think over my proposal to use the provincial restrictions instead of the municipal list. About which I’m not optimistic. We may have to divest ourselves of our two boas and one python, which, all things considered, I can manage. Could have been a lot worse — as I said, we won’t have to move.

It may well have been better not to have addressed council tonight, but what’s done is done.

Previously: A brief by-law update; My response to the Pontiac MRC animal control by-law.

Some news about the by-law situation I mentioned before; I don’t want to jump the gun and announce anything before next week’s town council meeting, but things look reasonably positive at the moment. I may not get absolutely everything I want, but it looks like we won’t be forced to choose between moving and getting rid of all our animals.

Depressing news from the Green Bay Press-Gazette on a Canadian study regarding intentional reptile roadkill: “According to researchers E. Paul Ashley of the Canadian Wildlife Service, Amanda Kosloski at the University of Western Ontario and Scott A. Petrie at the Long Point Waterfowl and Wetlands Fund in Ontario, nearly 3 percent of drivers intentionally crush snakes and turtles on roadways.” I’m not sure I agree with the conclusion that people are resistant to public education campaigns; I rather suspect that the turtle crossing road signs in eastern Ontario have had at least some impact. Or at least I need to believe that they have.

As I mentioned earlier, the Pontiac MRC is planning a new animal control by-law. It has come up with a draft for each of the 18 municipalities to approve. I have laid hands on a copy of that draft, in all its typo-ridden glory, and made a PDF of it; you can download it here.

It’s the kind of law that makes dedicated animal lovers nervous because it makes illegal activities that have been going on for a long time, and that may be perfectly legal elsewhere. Reptile keepers are used to these sudden changes in fortune — though not, as you will see from this entry, in Quebec. But in addition to restricting animals that are legal elsewhere in Quebec, the by-law would also ban dangerous dog breeds — something that is only starting to happen in larger city centres — and fix a maximum limit of five animals per household. Not five dogs or cats. Five animals. You can see where this is going.

When I first heard about the by-law, I freaked. But once I got my hands on the draft, I was able to see how I might be able to address my concerns without going ballistic, mobilizing public opinion or waging a media campaign. So I drafted the following letter, and sent it to my mayor:

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We lost another snake last week, which was unexpected: Jennifer found the male hognose snake dead in his cage. He’d been an inconsistent eater, and had been moved into a separate cage to see if that would help his appetite; he had, however, been eating again. Not sure what got him — clearly the inappetance was a symptom of something — but we discovered it too late to do a necroscopy.

On a happier note, almost every snake (and turtle) that was going to be moved into a new cage is now in their new digs; they all seem to be enjoying the additional room. It took some doing to get enough locks, but, as promised, the boa constrictor, bullsnakes and black pine snakes are now in their new enormous cages. The box turtle is now in the pine snakes’ old cage; the gray rat snake is in the female bullsnake’s cage; and the ball python is in the boa constrictor’s old cage. The male bullsnake’s old cage is now being shared by the male Okeetee corn snake and the Great Plains rat snake; meanwhile, the female blue-striped garter snake has moved in with the female red-sided garter snake. They’re getting along so far. Pretzel, my original female corn snake, is now on her own, away from Trouser’s wayward hemipenes, and the remaining garter snakes previously inhabiting five-gallon tanks are now in larger digs. And the female Cape gopher is now in the gray rat’s old cage. (I think that’s it.)

Moonlight, my male California kingsnake, is even more psycho lately: at his last feeding time, he refused his meal, preferring instead to strike at us through the glass. In the more than eight years I’ve had him, he’s never been this belligerent. (Nibbly, yes, but not angry.) Gonna have to keep an eye on him, in case this is symptomatic of something.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Never mind all this telescope shit, Jon — what about your damn snake collection? Tell us something new about that!”

Well, all right then.

Here’s our new — and fricking heavy — cage unit. This has been planned for years, and was ordered months ago. Little Ray’s built it; custom cage construction is one of their side gigs.

Once the paint fumes dissipate a bit, and we install the locks on the sliding glass doors, the unit’s new tenants will be as follows: one boa constrictor, two black pine snakes, and two bullsnakes, all of whom could stand bigger digs than they currently have. Once they’re in their new cages, other snakes will move into their old digs, and so on, and so on, so that even the small snakes who’ve outgrown their small cages will get an upgrade. All part of the plan I made a couple of years ago. It’ll probably take the rest of the month to get everybody moved, though.

And then there’s this, also from Little Ray’s:

We don’t buy very many snakes nowadays, but we made an exception for this young male Cape Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer vertebralis), born earlier this year. We have an older female that we bought last year, and have foolish breeding plans for the two of them. (Foolish in that expecting any success in snake breeding, given our luck lately, is rather foolhardy.)

Claire asks, “Do you ever keep your breeding pairs together all year round? Does this seem to cause any problems?” For the most part I do, although reptile keeper conventional wisdom suggests otherwise.

The rule of thumb is that keeping breeding pairs separately increases the chances of reproductive success when you do put them together. It’s part of the conditioning process, like hibernation: it apparently makes them more eager and receptive. Of course, many reptile keepers prefer to keep their snakes separately regardless of whether they’re breeding them. While that’s a full discussion in and of itself, it’s relevant in that introducing breeding pairs for brief periods is frequently done in that context.

I’m a dissident in that I will keep snakes two or three to the tank in the first place: I keep siblings and breeding pairs (or trios) together, and I have been known to keep compatible snakes of different species together (so long as they’re similar in terms of size and habitat, won’t eat each other, and are the same sex so that they won’t hybridize). But, when I had a breeding pair of Wandering Garter Snakes, I kept them separately, because they’re cannibalistic. Introducing them for breeding purposes worked: they were interested in screwing one another, rather than eating one another. (I’ve had worse luck with kingsnakes in that regard.) With other snakes that have little to no risk of cannibalism — such as my corn, pine, gopher and garter snakes — I frankly couldn’t be bothered. They’re kept together, and they breed if and when they feel like it.

Most of the time they do breed; my problem of late has not been one of interest, but of fertility — I’ve seen a lot of bad eggs over the past two years. Personally, I think hibernating them is far more important to breeding success than keeping them separately. Especially since keeping them separately can impede breeding success in at least one scenario: your snakes may be interested in breeding, but not necessarily at the moment you’ve put them together. If you don’t make sure they’re together during their breeding window, you don’t get eggs.

You may recall that Pretzel, one of my corn snakes, laid 17 eggs back in May. If they were going to hatch, they would have hatched by now. But they haven’t: they all went bad, one by one, over the course of their incubation.

Fortunately, Pretzel is showing no signs of laying a second clutch, so at least she won’t be wasting all that energy and body mass again — at least not this year. I must remember to get her away from Trouser before the next mating season: I meant to this year, but Trouser took advantage of my procrastination. With two years of nothing but bad eggs, and poor fertility the year before, it’s clearly time to give this pairing a rest.

Mike Fedzen writes to damn the Ringneck Diary — my abortive attempt to chronicle our attempts to keep Southern Ringneck Snakes (Diadophis punctatus punctatus) in captivity in 2003 — with faint praise:

I found your little project with ringneck snakes doing an internet search. It was interesting, a little.

You made it seem too difficult to keep ringneck snakes, that’s for sure. I’ve worked with ringneck snakes for over 10 years … I am basically a professional. Basically. I have bred them, and kept many many specimens successfully. My longest kept specimen was an almost 10 year albino northern ringneck snake captive.

You picked southern ringneck snakes. In my experience, they are EASILY the most easily kept sub-species. They feed on worms, FISH, frogs, lizards, snakes, and will switch onto mice easier than you can imagine. Try guppies if you don’t have worms. Southern ringneck snakes in my experience have the largest menu out of all sub-species. I’ve gotten many specimens on mice scented with fish/worms/frogs … basically anything with slime.

Continue reading this entry »

One problem with catching snakes in the wild and bringing them home as a pet is that some of them are live-bearing (such as garter, brown, red-bellied and water snakes), and many of them are pregnant when caught. What, then, do you do with the babies? A reader named Chantal asks whether they can be released back to the wild from which their mother came.

My answer is a qualified yes — but there are three very important caveats.

Continue reading this entry »

Imagine if your door-to-door Christian evangelist types never had to go door to door. Imagine if all they had to do was sit at home, relaxing, and wait for people to come by to ask them about the baby Jesus.

That’s what it’s like with snake keeping: when interested people find out that you have them, they come to you.

We just had four people — the neighbour’s older son and three of his friends — over for an hour showing them our collection. It was kind of spontaneous: they were out back and decided to ask to see the snakes. And we took four people who were, at best, ambivalent to a little bit interested and, after about an hour, had them all at least touching the snakes, and two of them doing an awfully good job at handling them — and one of them muttering about getting one himself.

It doesn’t always go that well, but the people who knock on your door asking to see snakes are, at least, self-selecting.

(I need to mention — as I do in my reptiles FAQ — that we don’t make a habit of offering tours of our collection. We’re not a zoo. We knew these people, so we were happy to oblige, but we’d generally like our evenings to ourselves, thank you very much.)

I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favourite snake from my collection, but it’s not hard at all to figure out which snake is the most popular with our guests. It’s Snuggles, our four-year-old male boa constrictor.

I’ve always been leery about giant snakes, but I’ve been very satisfied with Snuggles so far. Four years ago, when we got him, we figured that if we were going to start doing reptile shows, we needed to have a large boa or python. Burmese pythons are tame but huge (full-grown pythons can weigh as much as a person), and other giant species, such as anacondas or reticulated pythons, have quantifiably evil temperaments. Boa constrictors are a lot smaller than the others, but they’re also a lot tamer and a lot safer. Bottom line, I wanted a snake I could lift; I once had to do a show with a forty-pound, nine-foot Burmese who was sweet enough, but a bit much to pick up and maneuver with. (Yes, I’m weak.)

Continue reading this entry »

Brien Rocha writes:

I was wondering if you are supposed to take the snake out of its cage and switch it to another to feed it, then put it back in its own cage. Any thoughts?

The short answer is, it depends.

There are two reasons not to feed a snake in its own cage:

1. There is a chance that the snake could ingest some of the cage bedding when it eats. This is obviously not a problem when the snake is kept on newspapers or paper towels, but it’s more of a risk when it’s kept on sand, bark or wood chips. If that stuff gets blocked in the snake’s digestive tract — snakes can’t digest plant matter, for example — then the results could be fatal. (Now, we keep a lot of snakes on aspen shavings, and we do feed them in their cages, but we use a dish or tray to present the mouse, and keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t swallow any shavings. For the most part, this is more of a problem with stickier food — worms or fish — or with stickier cage bedding.)

2. It shares its cage with another snake. In that case, there’s danger that they might each grab the same food item at the opposite end from one another and, well, keep swallowing once they meet. I’ve had to separate garter snakes that grabbed opposite ends of the same worm, for example. You just don’t want the snakes to eat each other by accident. Yes, they’re dumb enough to do that — there are reports of snakes that have tried to swallow themselves!

There are drawbacks to taking a snake out of its cage to feed it, but they’re much less severe — certainly nothing fatal. An easily stressed-out snake might not want to eat after being disturbed. A snake that associates the cage being opened with feeding might decide to bite the hand that reaches for it. And, well, you have to wait for it to finish: this is a problem if you have a lot of snakes, and it’s a problem if the snake takes a while to get around to eating.

When dealing with snakes, you tend to assume that there is only one prickly end. But I had a bit of a surprise this afternoon when we were changing the cage of Piss-Boy, my male red-sided garter snake. While handling him, I experience a sharp prick came from the other end: the little bugger was everting his hemipenes — the ends of which are rather knobby, it would appear. Pricked by his prick, as it were — or at least one of them: snakes (and lizards) have two.

Poor guy: while he’s sired 92 baby garter snakes in his time with me, he hasn’t had any since July 2001. And when he’s in the mood to mate, he makes quite a spectacle of it: courtship takes weeks, and he doesn’t eat for months; he gives constant attention. I presume that a couple of the female garter snakes in the snake room are madly exuding pheromones, which is what has set him off. Unfortunately, the only female garter snake of the same subspecies in our collection is his daughter (from the 2002 litter). So he will have to, um, deal with it somehow.

Three more articles are now available on this site: one is new, two are old; all three deal with the social aspects of reptile keeping.

The Art of War on the Online Forums was my editorial for the September 2000 issue of The Ontario Herpetological Society News: it was a response to the flaming and nastiness on what was then the most popular reptile board, at least among my reptile-keeping friends and colleagues. I tried to parse out some of the more common causes for antisocial behaviour. (Since then, there has been an abundant literature on moderating online misbehaviour, but if it existed then, I wasn’t aware of it.)

How Volunteer Organizations Work — And Why They Don’t, my December 2000 editorial, was me using my bully pulpit to make a point about the OHS. A club needs to earn its membership: you can’t expect people to join your club without giving them a good reason to, I argued. It was a warning against inertia. Prescient, I suppose, because the OHS folded a few years later, pinned between volunteer burnout and membership indifference.

How to Write an Article for a Herp Society Newsletter is so new it hasn’t seen print yet: Bob will probably publish it in Chorus, the OARA’s newsletter, in the fall; I couldn’t wait that long, so here it is. In it, I identify some of the more common mistakes I’ve seen reptile hobbyists make when trying to write newsletter articles. As a newsletter editor, I always wanted more articles, but getting people to write them was hard. Getting good articles was harder.

There is a reason for posting these articles: I plan on doing some more writing on the theory and practice of amateur herpetological societies. Given how far behind I am on all my projects, I can’t say when I’ll have more to say on this subject, though.

The folks behind the Ontario Reptile Expo (hi there, Grant) had their second Ottawa-area show in Kemptville yesterday: they changed locations to the local arena, which I promptly forgot until I arrived at the empty former location. It’s the wrong season for me because the colubrids I’m interested in have yet to hatch — most animals for sale were lizards, boas or pythons — so at least we came home unscathed with only a big bag of aspen shavings and a whole whack of photos. The main reason for attending such events is social (much to the vendors’ chagrin, I think).

I’ve never seen such wide aisles at a reptile show: usually the vendors’ tables are packed in so tightly that if people are stopped at a table on each side the aisle is completely blocked. Nice to be able to circulate.

I’ve been breeding snakes since 2001, and though I’ve managed to see a live birth, I’ve never once been able to catch an egg-laying snake in the act of, well, laying eggs. Today that changed: we came downstairs this morning and caught Pretzel in the act of laying eggs in her nesting box, which was a clear plastic deli container (so we could see in). We could see how long it took an egg to pass the cloaca, and how long it took the next egg to pass down from its oviduct. I didn’t time it, but it takes a long time. In fact, the whole process took most of the day. A short while ago, we took her out, palpated her to make sure she was done, and counted the eggs.

She laid 17 of them. That’s a record. Normally, her first clutch, which is usually laid some time in May, is around 13 eggs. Why so many this time?

Continue reading this entry »

Pretzel has had her pre-egglaying shed, so we should have corn snake eggs by the end of the month.

Extrovert ate normally last night. Apparently last week’s nightcrawlers were just the thing to kick-start her appetite.

The gopher snakes are off their feed, but it’s been cold lately, and they’re notorious for losing their appetite in response to temperature changes. The female has a better excuse: we found an infertile egg in their cage yesterday. A nesting box was quickly added in case more are forthcoming.

It’s nice to be able to do frog monitoring without leaving your house. Spring peepers have been calling like mad for a while, but last night they were joined by American toads (whose calls started weakly but strengthened throughout the evening) and later by gray treefrogs (which were fewer in number). Three species, identified without even having to go outside.

Amphibian monitoring is important: FrogWatch Canada, FrogWatch USA, FrogWatch Australia.

A healthy — and noisy — frog population is a good sign of a healthy environment, I think, and if this is true, we’re doing well out here.

Last week, for example, I actually spotted a leopard frog on Main Street: I couldn’t bend to grab it, but I loomed over it to encourage it to hop across the road to the park. We’ve found toads and green frogs in our yard. The neighbour’s son has caught green frogs in the creek. Jennifer spotted a wood frog along the PPJ trail two years ago; last month we also saw them — and heard them — on Robert and Marilee’s property. We hear peepers frequently, even in town, spring and fall.

That’s a total of six species either seen or heard without too much effort. We have yet to see or hear bullfrogs, mink frogs, pickerel frogs or western chorus frogs — these last two species are quite rare, though; the first two we’ve seen plenty of elsewhere.

Pretzel, my female corn snake, is visibly pregnant. She’s also in shed, and she refused to eat last night. She usually eats during shed (unlike some other snakes), but she goes off her food just before egg-laying, so I guess we’re probably a couple of weeks away from her first clutch. Right on time: she usually lays in mid-May. Time to stock up on vermiculite and get the incubator ready.

Extrovert, my female wandering garter snake, has skipped her last few meals. That’s atypical — for a non-gravid female garter outside of hibernation, it’s almost unheard of. So I’m starting to get a bit concerned. She’s definitely not gravid: she hasn’t seen a male in five years. We’ll try fish, but I wonder whether she’s about to suffer the same problem that killed one of my Butler’s garters last year. I should palpate her. She’s eight years old, which is not ancient for her species.

Previously: More evidence of an early mating season; A garter snake update.

Update, 4:45 PM: We just offered Extro three nightcrawlers, which she just snarfed right down. Possibly the garter snake reset button in action again.

Occasionally, I leave my house and take pictures.

Some photos from a walk with Robert and Marilee on their property two weeks ago (Jennifer’s photos).

Photos from the Ottawa Central’s open house last Saturday (see my post on FRN). It was raining, at times heavy, and my kit lens got all spotty towards the end.

Also from last Saturday, photos from our first visit to Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo in years. For this one, I put away the spotty kit lens and used my new 50-mm f/1.8 prime lens, which, you may recall, has to be manually focused with a D40. I shot without a flash, which made for very shallow depths of field (f/1.8, ISO 1600), but I’m quite pleased with the results.

This whole thing with image macros and variants on lolcats — lolruses, gebrils (NOT sic), even lolbrarians and loltrek — and the associated mangled grammar is probably on the cusp of lameness, so why don’t I help it along with my own particular … idiom. Presenting LOLSNAKE!!!1one

Some of you may be aware that I used to keep a Northern Water Snake. (Yes, I had a licence for her.) She was born in captivity, and was astonishingly handleable and even ate mice, so she was a breeze to keep. She was also an amazing asset at educational displays: most people around here are deathly afraid of water snakes, which at their most basic are simply big garter snakes adapted to a diet of aquatic animals (if water snakes are feisty when caught, so too are large garter snakes). So a tame water snake was very, very useful.

When I moved to Quebec in 2003, I couldn’t keep the snake — provincial law does not allow for the keeping of protected species by private individuals — so I passed her over to a friend, who promptly got a licence for her.

You can see where this is going, can’t you? The owner wrote to say that the water snake was found dead last night. She would have been seven years old, which is kind of young for a water snake, but not excessively so. She almost certainly was carrying the same heavy parasite load in her lungs that, you may recall, killed so many of my other garter snakes. (The culprit, you may remember, was live — or at least whole — fish that carried those parasites.) That she held out as long as she did says something about her — or her species’ — resistance to big internal worms: she was almost certainly the last or next-to-last snake that was fed the contaminated batch.

In the comments on my last photo of Maya, Mike offered his condolences on our loss, to which he could relate, having had to put a cat down last year. But, he wrote,

It wasn’t quite the same when one of my corn snakes died after clutching though. How do you find it emotionally when one of the garters kicks off, or have you been fortunate enough to avoid that?

Regular readers of this blog — all six of you — will know, of course, that I’ve had more than a few garter snakes expire on me. Here’s what I wrote back:

I agree that it’s not quite the same (much as I’d like to pretend otherwise), but it was still a bit wrenching when a garter snake I’ve kept for years dies after a protracted illness, which has happened at least three times: to my female red-sided garter, who died of a liver tumour; to my male wandering garter, who died of a worm infestation; and to one of my Butler’s garters, who died from eggbinding.

I’m attached to all my animals, even the ones with little or no social interaction (i.e., the reptiles). But while I have to admit that there is a stronger emotional bond with a cat than, say, a corn snake, I’m still affected when I lose a reptile. Even if I’m not affected as much.

Either way, I feel a strong sense of responsibility: if I’m going to keep animals — especially exotic, wild animals — in captivity, I have a duty to ensure their health and, inasmuch as their little reptile brains can comprehend it, their happiness. When they die, I feel as though I’ve fucked up, even if they’re dead from natural causes or old age.

Both our bullsnakes are growing like mad and badly need new digs. The plan was to put them in a new cage together, because we were planning to breed them this year, but we haven’t gotten the new-cage project off the ground yet. But if the other critters are any indication, time’s a-wasting, so we introduced the male and female bullsnakes for the first time this afternoon. Only a little mating activity (some tail wagging, some male-on-female biting), but no hardcore action yet; we’ll give them more opportunities later.

This entry is about the potential impact of Bill 184, An Act to protect species at risk and to make related changes to other Acts, which was introduced yesterday in the Ontario Legislature, on the keeping of native reptiles and amphibians in captivity in that province. Some of what follows may have application beyond that, but bear in mind that my focus is deliberately limited.

Bill 184 does affect the legality of keeping native reptiles and amphibians in captivity in Ontario, especially if the species in question are listed as endangered, threatened or, to a lesser extent, species of special concern on the list of Ontario’s species at risk. In general, the new Act parallels the existing prohibitions and requirements of the current Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, 1997 (1997, c. 41), but is more restrictive on several points.

The text of the bill is available online as a PDF file. Follow along as I go through some of the details.

But before I go on, a disclaimer: this is based on a quick first look. And, while I’ve worked as a paralegal and am comfortable looking at legislation, I am not a lawyer and anything I could say about this bill could be totally wrong. Don’t base any decisions on what I write here.

Continue reading this entry »

New endangered species legislation introduced today in Ontario; see also backgrounder and notice of proposal. The text of the bill does not seem to be available yet.

It will be interesting to see if this new legislation will have any impact on reptile and amphibian keepers above and beyond the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, 1997, which has done double duty as a kind of species protection act to compensate for the quite-dated endangered species legislation last updated in 1984, but which does, I think, a journeyman’s job of regulating human interactions with sensitive species. (Penalties under the FWCA for killing, capturing, or selling protected species have a stiffness equivalent to other endangered-species laws.)

The main issues appear to be questions of land stewardship, habitat protection and the mechanism by which status is evaluated — none of these is addressed by the FWCA.

If anything, I expect changes to differentiate between levels of endangeredness, above and beyond what has already occurred in the regulations. See the list of species at risk in Ontario.

I’ll follow up when I have a chance to look at the bill itself.

You may recall that I had decided to retire Pretzel as a breeder, and planned to move her to a separate cage before breeding season. Well, heh heh, you know, a funny thing happened: breeding season came about six weeks early, before I’d gotten around to moving her out. Trouser pounced on her on March 3. (Apologies for the late report: I’ve had a bit of a week.) I’ve never seen it earlier than April — but then I’ve never gone without hibernating them before. You’d think that not hibernating them might depress the libido, but apparently corn snakes have other ideas. Now what?

No pictures of the event; I’ve got enough photographic evidence of his (and other snakes’) prior copulatory shenanigans.

Previously: Black pine snakes, giving us something to talk about.

Without question, the snakes in our collection that generate the most questions about potential offspring are the black pine snakes. I’m sure that if I kept better track I’d have quite the waiting list by now. If they produced lots of babies, I’d sell every last one, and at a healthy price, too. Unfortunately, they only produced a single viable clutch, and that was back in 2002; the clutch produced last year turned out not to be viable. I’ve always wondered why we haven’t been able to replicate our success.

Now yesterday we caught the two pine snakes in the throes of mating activity. I didn’t actually catch — or photograph — the actual act of intromission, but Lucifer certainly seemed to be trying, and was performing several stereotyped courtship behaviours as well. Fine and good — but it’s late February, which seems a little early. In past years, they were hibernating at this time, in separate containers. I wonder if our mistake — the reason why we’ve had such poor reproductive success — is because we’ve been hibernating them through their mating season?

An Israeli spa offers snake massages, where, for 300 shekels, clients get to have six snakes crawl across their bodies. Of note, the spa is Israeli but the snakes are the usual North American pet species:

Barak uses California and Florida kingsnakes, corn snakes and milk snakes in her treatments, which she said were inspired by her belief that once people get over any initial misgivings, they find physical contact with the creatures to be soothing.

This is something that can be arranged, you know. Photos here; via Boing Boing.

Further to my previous report: the last two stubborn feeders, a male eastern garter snake and a male albino checkered garter snake, ate with relish this afternoon. Jennifer scented the fuzzies’ heads with worm goo, and the checkered garter had been given additional heat. Which means that every single snake that went off its feed in the fall is now eating again. (Only they didn’t go off all at once: in September it was the glossy, gopher and hognose snakes; by the time they started eating again in October, some of the male garter snakes stopped eating. As I said, all eating just fine now.)

Holy shit. In Toronto, an Egyptian cobra has been on the loose for two months, forcing tenants out of two houses and their landlords to go without an income during that time. The cobra was one of three venomous snakes kept illegally by one tenant; the other two — another Egyptian cobra and a gaboon viper — have been seized, and the owner is due in court on Friday.

Every so often one of my young snake keeping friends has their pet snake escape. Usually it turns up again within a couple of weeks; it’s usually no big deal, because they live in single detached houses and the snakes are harmless: it’s mainly a question of the snake’s safety, not anyone else’s (and escaped snakes can survive for months).

But there’s a big difference between a corn snake on the loose and a venomous snake on the loose, especially when the keeper is living in an apartment.

My position is as follows:

1. You should never let snakes escape. If your snake escapes, it’s your fault. QED.
2. You should never let snakes escape if you live in an apartment or undetached dwelling. If your snake escapes and turns up in someone else’s apartment, you’re in a lot of trouble.
3. The legality or morality of keeping venomous snakes notwithstanding, if you live in an apartment or undetached dwelling, you should never keep venomous snakes. Ever. If you do, and your venomous snake escapes, you’re fucked.

I never have and never will keep venomous snakes. Even so, I haven’t had an escape in more than four years, and I’ve never completely lost a snake — I’ve almost always found the snake out of its cage rather than an empty cage. I’m proud of that fact.

Good news on the snake feeding front tonight:

• Recalcitrant garter snakes were offered fish fillet; all but one ate.
• Newly acquired baby corn snake ate without having to be confined.
• Longtime anorexic leucistic Texas rat snake ate a frozen/thawed mouse.

Virtually every snake that went off its feed earlier this fall is eating again. The garters are not back on mice, but that shouldn’t take long. Stinky poo in the meantime.

Most of the recent news about our reptile collection revolves around garter snakes.

For the most part, the recalcitrant feeders are eating again, but most of the male garter snakes continue to be stubborn. I did not note differences in feeding enthusiasm in my article on the differences between male and female garter snakes, but I’m beginning to think that males might be more prone to go off their feed. Certainly there are Darwinian reasons for females to eat, eat, eat, eat; males can get by at a level much closer to subsistence. Piss-Boy, my male red-sided garter, went two months without eating in the fall of 2000 — he was too busy humping the female I’d just introduced him to. Priorities.

Continue reading this entry »

The dumbasses at Exclusive Dragons are using my photo of my Baird’s rat snake to sell one of theirs. I’ve sent e-mails to them and to the site’s webmaster. If it doesn’t disappear right quick they’ll be in serious trouble.

Reptile hobbyists take a perverse pleasure in stealing one another’s photos. Here’s a primer for mine. They’re all copyrighted: you don’t need a notice or a watermark for that. They’re also licensed under a Creative Commons Licence: that means that you can use them freely so long as you (1) identify me as the photographer and (2) don’t use them for commercial purposes. By using the photo in a classified ad without crediting me as the photographer, Exclusive Dragons broke both rules. But not only does Robin Moniz steal other people’s photos without credit, this individual also is using a photo of one snake to sell another, and that’s dishonest. Would you buy a reptile from such a person?

Besides, I believe I saw their snake for sale at the reptile expo in Kemptville this month, and it was hardly in “excellent” condition. I’ve been looking for a female Baird’s rat snake for years, and I passed that one up — what does that tell you?

Update, 9:48 PM: The offending ad has been removed (thanks Grant); I have screenshots if you’re interested.

Update, 10/25: Robin has apologized; she claims a mixup in photos on the hard drive (between photos-of and favourites-downloaded).

More snakes are finding their appetite again (see previous entry). The female hognose snake and both Great Basin gopher snakes ate their mice like good little snakes last night.

Meanwhile, many of the garter snakes have been refusing meals here and there. This is a known issue, and I’m not overly worried about it.

After some tweaking of room temperatures and feeding methods, some of our recalcitrant feeders are starting to eat again: the leucistic Texas rat snake took its first mouse in two months, and the male hognose snake is back on his feed. (The others haven’t been tried yet; their next feeding is forthcoming.)

The new Okeetee corn snake was being stubborn about it too, but confinement — essentially, stuffing the little snake in a film canister with a pinky mouse — is working well: she’s eaten twice by that method. I’m confident she’ll be taking mice more enthusiastically, and without assistance, before long.

Acquisitions continue: yesterday we picked up a lovely juvenile female Cape Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer vertebralis), with plans to find a compatible male ASAP. She’s in quarantine with the Okeetee right now. I should take her picture or something; cape gophers, if you don’t already know, are stunning.

Other acquisitions are in the works, and will be announced once they’ve arrived.

Eight messages (so far) doesn’t exactly constitute a bombardment, but new reptile site Snake Tracks has been sending me automated e-mail at virtually every address they can find on the Internet (addressed in some cases to “Librarything” or “Feedburner,” so you know they did their homework) — asking, as usual, for a link exchange. You know what that means: if someone asks you for an “exchange,” it’s all in their favour — they need it more than you do.

And, as it turns out, Snake Tracks is yet another generic set of reptile forums, with hardly any members (only 28 so far) or other original content. (A ball python care sheet and a species list? That’s it? Are you kidding me?) There are about four zillion other reptile sites just like it out there. And they call themselves the “World’s Largest Snake Enthusiast Website” — which is not only laughable, it’s demonstrably false.

(Hint: Spamming me isn’t a good way to get a positive review.)

An update on our collection.

After four passes with Vapona (see previous entries), we’re tentatively declaring our collection mite-free.

I mentioned that we’ve been thinking of taking Pretzel off the breeding treadmill. Those plans are now more concrete: she’ll be put in a separate cage before mating season starts up again.

If we’re going to breed snakes, we need to increase the pool of breeders; if we’re not going to breed snakes, we should really scale back from what we have. We’ve decided, therefore, to get a few more corn snakes, with the eventual goal of having several pairs breeding at any one time. That should take care of pet store demand, provide enough variety, and provide insurance if not every pair is fertile. Jennifer has started this process; last weekend she picked up a hatchling female Okeetee corn snake, to pair up — eventually — with our two-year-old male. But it’ll be at least three years before any offspring comes of that pairing. We’ll probably get three or four more corns; we haven’t figured out which varieties, yet.

Falling autumn temperaturers caught us off-guard a bit, and several snakes have entered hibernation mode: the glossy snake, the gopher snakes and the hognose snakes have all gone a month without eating. I expect they’ll restart at some point, and am not yet overly worried: these gophers and hognoses are notorious for going off their feed from time to time.

Our friend Nicki has acquired a Radiated Rat Snake (Elaphe s.l. radiata). Here are some things that have been written about the temperament of this species.

Bartlett and Bartlett, Corn Snakes and Other Rat Snakes (1996): “When even vaguely threatened, the radiated [rat snake] (so-called for the three dark lines that radiate outward from the eye) pulls is neck back, inflates its throat, and vigorously defends itself.”

Schulz, A Monograph of the Colubrid Snakes of the Genus Elaphe Fitzinger (1996):

The snake is very fast if it becomes necessary to flee and shows an amazingly aggressive temperament if cornered: The front part of the body is inflated vertically, bent into a double S-shape, and lifted off the ground. With the mouth agape and short hissing sounds, it literally leaps at the aggressor who may even [be] pursued for some distance. If the snake is picked up, it often empties its bowels and bites[;] the bitten part is often chewed on for a while.

Not for the faint of heart! Which is to say, me. (Nicki knows what she’s doing, though.)

Snakes on Film is my latest project. It’s a look at how snakes are used in movies and television — whether they’re accurately portrayed, and which species are being used. Think of this as a nitpicker’s guide for reptile enthusiasts. History buffs have had great fun picking apart historical movies; science fiction geeks love pointing out errors in continuity. Now it’s the snakes’ turn. Five posts up so far, with five more in the immediate queue. (Yes, Snakes on a Plane is forthcoming; that was the movie that finally set this project in motion.)

A bite from a venomous snake that does not inject any venom is called a “dry bite.” Sometimes a venomous snake withholds its venom when it bites in self-defence, saving it for prey — venom is primarily a means of subduing and pre-digesting prey, and only secondarily a self-defence mechanism.

Someone who receives a “dry bite” is called a “lucky bastard” — and that certainly applies to the unnamed 26-year-old Barrie, Ontario man who received a dry bite on Tuesday from a friend’s saw-scaled viper, which he had reportedly been poking at. Indian River Reptile Zoo curator Bry Loyst, who manages the Ontario Antivenin Bank, was rushed to the hospital in Barrie with some antivenin as a precaution. See news coverage from the Barrie Examiner, Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.

Saw-scaled vipers, which range from Africa to India, are both extremely irascible and extremely toxic: they kill a lot more people than some of the more glamorous snakes in their region, like cobras, if not more than any other species on the planet. You may remember the incident six years ago with the guy in Toronto whose venomous snake got loose, generating national headlines? Same species.

No black pine snakes this year; all the eggs have collapsed. (Some looked fine until you turned them over.) Oh well.

The worldwide reaction to Steve Irwin’s death has been swift, strong and usually sympathetic, but it’s inevitable that some people are insufficiently socialized that they cannot help but take a shot at the recently departed and the circumstances of his death.

Jason Calacanis says that the Discovery Channel killed him because of its focus on televising risky encounters with wildlife; Germaine Greer says that the stingray attack was the animal world extracting its revenge. The sentiment behind these posts occurs elsewhere, and can be distilled into one of two arguments: Steve Irwin was an irresponsible thrill seeker; Steve Irwin was a cruel tormentor of animals. Either way, it’s poetic justice — in other words, he got what was coming to him — and the commentariat, whether in the op-ed pages or on the blogosphere, thrives on poetic justice the way it revels in Schadenfreude.

My response to those espousing these arguments is simple. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

Continue reading this entry »

A few years back, a rumour would start going around the Internets every so often that Steve Irwin had, honestly for sure really this time, gotten himself killed doing the things that Steve-o does. The rumours were always bunk. So my first response was to disbelieve the report, which I first saw on a reptile mailing list. But this time it’s true: Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin was killed this morning by a freak accident with a stingray.

No matter how careful you are, no matter how outside the risk is, it’s never the animal’s fault. Irwin would be the first to say so.

From the Guardian’s story, I learn a new word: “larrikin” — loosely, a maverick or wild-spirited person — which is how Australian Prime Minister John Howard described Irwin. He was also, as the tributes have noted, one of Australia’s biggest ambassadors, though I’m given to understand that many were just a mite bit embarrassed by him and his “fair-dinkum” schtick. Which, apparently, wasn’t a schtick at all.

Never mind Australia: he was the best ambassador that the unloved animals of the world — my kind of animals — ever had.

He was a crazy bastidge, and we need more like him.

So, Snakes on a Plane. Saw it Tuesday night, and I’m finding myself in agreement with Kent Williams’s review in the Madison, Wisconsin Isthmus:

The movie’s neither good enough nor bad enough to leave much of an impression. Director David Ellis does seem to have gotten the memo about camping it up, but perhaps not as early in the filmmaking process as some would have liked. And so the movie kind of careens between Airport (with snakes) and Airplane (with snakes), genre and genre parody. Itching to get things started, Ellis lets his snakes — all 400 of them — out of the cargo bay much too early, passing up any chance for suspense. And most of them are so clearly digitized, you feel like you’re watching a cartoon.

That it was self-consciously over the top was what made it watchable; that its over-the-top scenes were so scattershot was what made it disappointing. You can tell where the gratuitous language, nudity and gross-out scenes were added: without them, the movie would have been more earnest, less fun, and just plain mediocre — it would have been a forgettable, low-budget bomb.

Even so, the character development and writing were profoundly weak; we needed Samuel L. to come alive more, to inhabit his typecast bad-ass persona more — in other words — say the 12-letter M-word more — in order to breathe more life into this film. As it stands, you can see the plastic surgeon’s scars.

But never mind that shit. What about the motherfucking snakes?

Continue reading this entry »

We’re just finishing up the second mite treatment for the collection: after four days, we’ve removed the dichlorvos and are putting the water dishes back in. We’ve found quite a few dead mites in some of the cages, plus, I’m afraid, one small live one, in the ball python’s cage. This means that we’ll almost certainly have to do a third treatment. I suspect that the first dose (see previous entry) wasn’t long enough (it was three days instead of four), and the gap between it and this, second treatment was too long as a result of the vacation in the middle of it (they should be two weeks apart; it was three). Note for future reference. But we are killing mites — hopefully faster than they’re breeding. Cross your fingers.

Continue reading this entry »

We spent today recovering from yesterday, when, as part of our collection-wide treatment for snake mites, we cleaned every reptile cage in the house — all 34 of them.

We’d been on guard for mites for a while, since a snake that had been passed between our collection and a friend’s turned up with mites a while back (it doesn’t really matter who gave who mites, and it’s impossible to tell in any event), but we were reluctant to begin the treatment until we had definite confirmation that mites were present at our end. We only confirmed mites — on three snakes — a week ago today, which set the treatment process in motion.

Continue reading this entry »

I wasn’t sure whether Lilith, my female black pine snake, was going to lay eggs at all — she doesn’t every year, and she’s usually the last to do so — but she’s laying eggs right now. Look!

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the eggs will be fertile; she’s laid slugs before. Cross your fingers.

Here’s what I’ve been working on lately: Reptiles at Risk. My friends at Sciensational Sssnakes!! have done road trips before, but this time, thanks to some external funding, they’re kicking it up a notch. Beginning this summer (actually, beginning last Monday), they’re embarking on several multi-province tours to bring the message of reptile conservation to small, rural communities that would not normally be host to reptile shows, but that are also host to populations of threatened or endangered reptile species. As usual, I’m doing the site; it’s mostly done now (I think the IE-specific bugs are taken care of), but there are likely to be further refinements and embellishments as we go.

Watching a rerun of The Colbert Report the other day, Jennifer and I ended up laughing ourselves senseless over this bit, which combines the gay marriage debate with reports that a woman in India had married a snake, and takes it into very strange territory …

Of course, part of the reason we were laughing so hard is because Colbert is actually describing the right way to sex a snake. We were pointing at the screen and screaming: “Ahhh! He’s actually doing it! Oh god oh god oh god.” (Gasp. Breathe.)

When you’re snake people, it’s not something you expect to see, you see. Wow.

I wasn’t planning to breed our bullsnakes before next year, but the female had other plans: she laid two infertile eggs in the water dish overnight. In the water dish, because snakes like to lay eggs in moist places, and snakes who aren’t given nesting boxes — e.g., snakes who’ve never mated — frequently pick the water dish to deposit their eggs. That, or they get egg-bound.

This bodes well for next year, but I was really hoping for some nice, fertile black pine snake eggs. (Cross your fingers: Lilith is looking squishy and has been given a nesting box.)

Meanwhile, our corn snake eggs are collapsing. I’m not sure whether it’s simply because Pretzel is no longer very fertile, or because we’re doing something wrong in our incubator. We (by which I mean Jennifer and I) may well have to have Kim over here for a consultation!

Jennifer performed a necroscopy on the Butler’s garter snake last night to find out what killed her. From what I can tell, it’s something completely different from what I anticipated.

To be sure, the snake died from starvation. That was the direct cause. There was no fat and very little muscle left; the snake had metabolized it all. But the reason for starvation was that something was blocking her gastrointestinal tract: with a compressed stomach, she had no desire to eat. At first she stopped eating mice, but continued to accept earthworms. Then, at the last, she refused earthworms: the blockage was too large even for worms.

But what was the blockage? What was the cause of the hard lumps I felt along her abdomen? I suspected organ tumours, based on her advanced age. Alternatively, I worried that it might be fecoliths — hardened fecal matter in the intestinal tract — which, unlike tumours, were both preventable and treatable (so if she died from it, it would be my fault). It turned out to be neither.

Continue reading this entry »

The Butler’s garter I referred to in previous entries (here and here) has now died. She had refused to eat earthworms over the weekend, which just does not happen with this species, so we knew her time had run out.

We’ll do a necroscopy this evening and find out what killed her.

Overall, though, I’m neither disappointed nor embarrassed (unless the necroscopy shows that we fucked up somehow). Six years is an extremely good run for this species, three times as long as the record. And the remaining Butler’s garter is still going very strong — she’s the big, hungry one who likes to bite.

At some point I should write an article on the long-term care of this species.

Thirteen of Pretzel’s eggs are now residing in our incubator; she is now her usual gaunt and hollow post-deposition self. For some reason, her first clutch is almost always 13 eggs.

The eggs should hatch in late July; assuming no complications, the babies will be available after they’ve eaten three consecutive meals of frozen/thawed pinky mice — probably no earlier than late August, unless they decide to be stubborn.

Dept. of Not Dead Yet. The problematic Butler’s garter snake (see previous entry) still has a bit of life left to her: she ate two nightcrawlers last night. (Sometimes, snakes that do not normally eat mice but have been trained to do so will, at certain points, refuse to eat mice but will continue to eat their original food; more about that here.)

I’ve had two female Butler’s garter snakes (Thamnophis butleri) in my care since October 2000. They were only a few months old at the time, which means they’re now approaching six years of age. That’s nearly three times the record of two years in Slavens (which is no longer being updated), and I’m quite proud of being able to keep them alive for this long.

I’ve been wondering when we might start running into geriatric health issues with these snakes. Larger garter snakes can easily pass 10 years (Piss-Boy is at least nine), but smaller natricines seem to have shorter lifespans — Storeria’s record, for example, is somewhere between four and seven years — so Butler’s garters might be similarly short-lived.

Continue reading this entry »

Pretzel, our breeder female corn snake, refused to eat last night, and she’s definitely carrying eggs. She usually lays in mid- to late May, so she’s right on schedule. She still looks a little thin, though; I wish we could have gotten more mice into her. I shudder to think how hollow she’s going to be after egg deposition.

For the first time since coming out of hibernation in early March, earlier this week both hognose snakes ate the food they were offered. The male had eaten once before; the female hadn’t. Neither was looking particularly gaunt or had anything else visibly wrong with them; I can only surmise that they simply weren’t ready to come out of hibernation yet. Both, however, had shed shortly either the night before or the day before they were offered food this time, so maybe they need a post-hibernation shed before they start eating. (Note for future reference.)

Now let’s see if they’ll breed!

Our corn snakes tend to start with the courtship and the breeding and the carrying-on in mid-April, and this year is no exception: they were making a right spectacle of themselves last night. On schedule.

Between the date you bring your snakes out of hibernation and the date your female snake lays its first clutch of eggs (or has its first litter, if it’s a live bearer), the challenge is to get as much food into that snake is possible. For most snakes with healthy appetites, that’s not a problem, but there are some exceptions.

For example, my female Great Basin gopher snake has gone off her feed for extended periods during the summer — she’s from a Canadian bloodline, so I think she’s aestivating when that happens. In her case, it seems that hibernation actually helps her appetite, though.

Continue reading this entry »

All of our breeding snakes — the corn snakes, the Great Basin gopher snakes, the black pine snakes and the western hognose snakes — are now out of hibernation. They were down for a little longer than usual — nearly four months — as an experiment to see whether it would help. On the other hand, we weren’t able to maintain low temperatures in our basement: I’d been hoping for 12-15°C, and got 17-18°C instead. We’ll see how it turns out.

It’s the middle of winter and two of our garter snakes — the smaller of our two Butler’s garters and our male plains garter — are turning up their noses at mice. This sometimes happens during the winter. So we’re offering them fish fillet, for now. I imagine they’ll start eating something healthier in short order, but in the meantime the implications are … smelly. Or at least they will be in a day or two.

A couple of weeks ago, I got the following question from Craig Sommers: “I recently received a comment from a Fish & Wildlife Service biologist who said that ‘garter snake’ is now one word for all common names. True?”

As I wrote back, the answer is a bit complicated, but his question reminded me that I’ve been thinking about this question for several years now. It’s a really arcane and insignificant question: whether snake names are one word or two — i.e., “garter snake” or “gartersnake.”

This little essay has been gestating in my mind for several years, but I’ve been putting it off because I didn’t think I knew my grammar enough to write with any authority. In the end, though, I figure it’s worthwhile — inasmuch as this whole subject is worthwhile, which is kind of debateable — to put out what I know and what I think, and leave the corrections to another time.

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Belated photo update: I’ve created two new photosets on my Flickr account. This one is a selection of photos from an impromptu OARA field trip two weeks ago; this one is a collection of photos of my snakes engaged in the horizontal mambo. By far my most popular photos on Flickr are a couple of closeups of my corn snakes doing the nasty, presumably due to people using “graphic sex” as a search term, and getting grossed out by the results. Well, tough; here are some more.

On a related note, there are two Flickr groups roughly equal in size with roughly the same mandate: Herp Photography, which I started about a year ago, and Reptiles and Amphibians. Duplication inevitably happens with user-created groups on community sites, but it’s rare to see two of equal quality that do equally well. I wonder if we should consolidate, assuming that we even can.

“How many snakes do you have?” That’s easily the most common question we get about our snake keeping. The number fluctuates, especially if you include the offspring we’re raising for sale, but it hovers around 40 or so permanent snakes. Right now — I just counted — we have 38 permanent snakes and seven babies being raised for sale.

The answer to the first question invariably brings us to the second question: “How can you keep that many snakes?”

The straight answer is, they don’t take up much room and their cages are stackable. This is quite true: zoo guidelines suggest that snakes be kept in cages the combined length and width of which equal or exceed the snake’s length — for example, a four-foot snake would be properly housed in a cage three feet long and one foot deep. And since we make a point of working with smaller species — about one-third of the collection is made up of garter snakes, for example — it’s not at all difficult to find the room for that number of snakes.

But people asking that question aren’t really looking for a technical answer; they’re really asking, “How (on Earth) can you (possibly) keep … ” It’s akin to being asked how you can possibly eat a disgusting food item: while saying that “I open my mouth and shovel it in” is technically answering the question, it’s not what they mean.

So I’ll try to answer the question they’re really asking.

Continue reading this entry »

The gopher snake eggs went bad some time ago, and now Pretzel’s second clutch isn’t looking viable: most of the eggs have collapsed.

I wonder if these girls are simply getting too old? Unfortunately, I didn’t get them as hatchlings, so I have no sure way of telling how old they are. I’ve had Tosh for four years and Pretzel for six.

I mentioned yesterday that the landlord’s daughter looked after our apartment when we were off in the Maritimes. She was basically housesitting for the cats, frog, turtle and fish; one of the advantages of snakes is that they can be left alone for a week or two with very little risk. She was a trooper, but a little ambivalent about the snakes. Not to worry, we said: just change their water if they foul it and make sure they have enough of it; she wouldn’t have to feed them or touch them.

But curiosity persisted, especially among those who visited with her, viz., her younger brother and her boyfriend. So on Wednesday night we invited them over to watch us feed the snakes.

Watching snakes eat is always popular, and inevitably draws crowds. It’s not just that they get a perverse thrill out of watching them snuff the life out of some inoffensive little animal, as a city official once declared to me during by-law negotiations. It’s the amazement that the snake can eat something that big, and can do it without chewing, biting off into pieces, or table manners. It’s one thing to explain how a snake’s skull is flexible and can disjoint itself in several places where a human skull is fused together, quite another to see it in action.

So of course they ate up seeing the snakes eat up, especially the rat eaters, who looked about ready to explode. The gopher snakes went off their feed again (sigh), so their adult mice were redistributed; the Baird’s rat snake got one, after his hopper mouse, and looked enormous thereafter.

But it wasn’t just the ability to eat something huge, either; it was the speed with which snakes attacked their meals. Many of these snakes don’t move around real fast otherwise, so it was a bit of an eye-opener to see them strike (and in some cases constrict) in an instant.

All in all, they were transfixed. This is the sort of thing that will make us very popular with the local kids, and quite possibly very unpopular with their mothers.

Enough time had passed since their hatching that it was time we tried to feed the corn snake hatchlings. We’ve had trouble getting Pretzel’s babies to eat at the outset before, but this time we were luckier: five out of six ate their first meal without difficulty. The severely kinked one — the one that Jen manually pipped — did not eat, but it had not yet shed; again, Jen had to help. It’s not unusual for snakes to refuse their meals the first few times; to have only one refuse is the best results we’ve had with corn snakes, ever.

Meanwhile, Pretzel laid another ten eggs, which look good and are now in the incubator. She looks as gaunt as she usually does immediately after deposition, but not emaciated. I was worried for a while that she hadn’t fed up enough between clutches. But all is well, I think. Now to fatten her up before hibernation.

Here’s something I did during my enforced time offline: I finally got the photos from the 2003 Spotted Turtle Survey online, only two years and three months late (see previous entry). I procrastinated uploading them for the longest time because I had a hard time winnowing them down. I’ve frequently had that problem when trying to pick from too many photos; I think I’m finally over that, though, because I managed to pick the 27 best photos from more than 170. And I think these photos are awfully good even if I do say so myself. (For more on the survey, see my report from the 2001 trip.)

It was a hot one around here today — the kind of day around here where mammals hide in the basement and snakes shit all over their cages and in their water dishes (an all-too-obvious byproduct of being fed last Friday). And one of the eggs that Jennifer manually pipped yesterday actually turned out to be viable: our sixth baby corn snake is emerging as I write. Unfortunately another kinked one, and damned if I can figure out why.

Two baby corn snakes have emerged from their eggs so far.

Update (12:30 PM): Two more have emerged, one of which appears kinked in two places (damn). One still hiding in its egg, one apparently viable egg not yet pipped, the rest questionable to no good. (Incidentally, this would normally be considered a crummy clutch — only five out of 13? — but my standards are lower lately.)

The corn snake eggs are beginning to hatch. Two have pipped so far; none have emerged yet. It can take a few days for every snake to pip their shell and crawl out. With any luck, those that made it to this point will all be out by the end of the weekend.

Update: As of 10:40 PM, a total of five have pipped; none of them have crawled out yet. Another two eggs look good but have not yet pipped; the remaining eggs have collapsed or gone mouldy.

We discovered three eggs from the Great Basin gopher snake this morning; she’d skipped last year because she was eating poorly, but her appetite is back this year. We’ll see if any of them will be fertile.

Meanwhile, the first clutch of corn snake eggs (previous entry) is approaching its due date, but many of the eggs have collapsed or are otherwise not looking good. At this point I’ll be happy with any hatchings. Given the heat wave, I expect them to hatch a few days early.

As I mentioned previously, Pretzel has been camped out in her nesting box. She’s been there for more than a week (here she is last Tuesday). We checked on her tonight: once we got Trouser out of the way — male snakes invariably hog the nesting box for some reason — we discovered that she’d laid 13 eggs, which look really good. They’ll probably hatch around July 10 or so, give or take a few days.

The first major reptile care article I’ve written in more than three years, Raising Baby Garter Snakes: Some Personal Observations, is now online at gartersnake.info. It first appeared in The Garter Snake, the EGSA’s quarterly, last month. The editor, Daniel Grübner, wanted contributions from North America, so I obliged with 2,400 words or so. The article focuses primarily on what I’ve learned through trial and error in raising more than 100 baby garter and ribbon snakes; it’s anecdotal rather than definitive, but hopefully useful. It’ll also serve as the basis for a chapter on breeding for the long-planned garter snake care manual.

Further to my post last July, Jennifer is now, as of 30 minutes ago, the only person on the planet ever to be bitten by a Butler’s garter snake. The larger, more aggressive one — how often has that adjective been used with Thamnophis butleri? — was the culprit. Cheeky, ravenous monkey.

Feeding time otherwise uneventful. The new checkered garter has a good appetite despite his propensity to flip out when we’re nearby. Pretzel had her pre-egg-laying shed a few days ago and is camped out in her humidity box. Eggs should follow in about a week. Time to dust off the incubator. Literally.

The Great Basin gopher snakes are out in British Columbia; Dave68’s got photos. Even though I have a captive pair of them, it’s nice to see photos of them in the wild. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my grandparents about three years ago, when I was visiting them in Calgary: they move every few years or so, and they’ve had a couple of stints in the Okanagan, where they still have friends. My grandmother mentioned that one of her friends was commenting about the “bullsnakes” on the golf courses in Vernon. Immediately I piped up, “Great Basin gopher snakes. I breed those.” I suspect that my grandmother, who’s terrified of snakes, was nonplussed.

The Okanagan is home to a whole pile of interesting species, including rattlesnakes, rubber boas, racers and night snakes. To say nothing of the railway history, scenery and wineries. I’ve been there before; I must find a pretext to visit again.

Last Sunday’s trip to the reptile show resulted in this new acquisition. The upshot of which is that I’ll be able to breed Checkered Garter Snakes in a year or two. Which is good, because for all my garter snake wankery, I haven’t had a breedable pair of garters in nearly two years. So add albino and normal Checkered Garter Snakes to our future projects list, though given the size of my females, possibly not before 2007 unless I feed them up heavily.

Pretzel is definitely gravid; she refused her meal last night and is big and squishy in her back half. (I wasn’t able to palpate any eggs, though that might be due to my lack of skill rather than their lack of developement.) So it’s safe to say that eggs will follow her next shed. It’s also safe to say that she’ll be her usual emaciated self afterwards. (Feeding her up will simply make her double-clutch. Keeping weight on her is a challenge, to say the least.) This didn’t stop Trouser from pouncing on her again — it was Saturday, after all (see previous entries: 1, 2).

The corn snakes were humping again this morning, so it must be Saturday.

Saturday night: the corn snakes get busy; Jennifer comes home from an open house — well, an open barn — smelling like cow, at which point Goober, who must have spent some of his youth in a barn, immediately tries to eat her hair.

Snakes in captivity are invariably fed too much. Keepers, particularly novices used to mammalian metabolisms, have a hard time grasping the concept that even once a week may lead to obesity. I’ve seen some hideously overweight snakes, with a thick layer of fat outside their rib cages. Snakes have low metabolisms, and in captivity they don’t exactly exercise much.

Our snakes are not overfed. This is as much a function of weekly feedings being stretched out to every 10 to 14 days as a result of scheduling as it is by design, but either way it works. Overall, I’m pleased with our snakes’ condition: they’re mostly lean and muscular, with little or no fat.

Even so, our glossy snake is looking heftier than she should, and that’s probably a result of her diet — not the amount or the frequency, but the kind. Glossy snakes normally feed on lizards in the wild, though they’re not strict specialists; in captivity they can and will take rodents, and ours has eaten nothing but since I got her in September 2001 (see previous entry). Generally, she’s preferred mice on the small size, and I think that’s because she’s not keen on fur: she ends up eating multiple pinky mice rather than larger sizes, though she’s been eating fuzzy mice (the next step up) recently.

I seem to recall (but cannot find the reference to it) that gray-banded kingsnakes — another lizard-eating species — that are kept long-term on a mouse diet accumulate serious fatty deposits. I wonder if that’s akin to what’s happening here. It’s not an unreasonable guess that a mouse diet is too rich for the glossy snake (though it doesn’t seem to be a problem for garter snakes; then again, they’re more active), though I don’t yet know what to do about it. (Lizards are not an option!) For the moment, I’ll try cutting her back some more and see if that helps.

I’ve been putting up some of my older snake photos — finally! — and putting them into albums on Flickr. First, our current reptile collection, one photo per critter, with some photos a few years old. (But they’re good photos.) Second, some feeding photos; I’ve got some more of these coming. And third and most spectacularly, photos of the Red-sided Garter Snakes being born back in June 2002 (see previous entry). Enjoy.

The snakes are now out of hibernation and back in their cages. Another of the baby corn snakes didn’t make it, so we’re down to one, which at least ate a few times before we cooled it down. Lilith was very happy to see us again (see previous entry); the gopher snakes were more phlegmatic. Looks like Trouser is already quite active; Pretzel will no doubt be pounced on shortly.

Today I finally managed to write a 2,400-word draft of an article on raising baby garter snakes, which if all goes well will end up in The Garter Snake, the EGSA’s newsletter.

It’s been a while since I’ve written something for print rather than the web. In fact, it’s been nearly three years since I wrote anything other than a book review for the reptile hobby press. It felt good. Writing was comfortable: I had no trouble getting back into the zone and maintaining my focus.

Despite the total lack of pay, I don’t mind writing these articles: I adopt a fairly informal, conversational tone, compared to the stilted, ersatz-scientific discourse many hobbyists adopt. That may have something to do with my writing skills (ahem), but it reflects the fact that I’m not trying to be professional. I’m just sharing knowledge, not trying to impress.

We checked up on our hibernating snakes tonight, making sure that they were still alive and had clean water. All was well, if not necessarily happy.

True to form, the female Pituophis were not pleased to be disturbed; they hissed constantly and struck occasionally. Of course I took the opportunity to get photos; it’s not every day you get confronted by an angry Pit. (And a good thing, too, because if they’re trying to intimidate, they’re really good at it.) See also this photo of Lilith in addition to the one at right.

Par for the course: the gopher snake was angry at Florence and me in December 2001, and Lilith was loud and aggressive when she was brought out of hibernation in early 2003.

Too bad it never occurs to me to record the sound.

They’re a little late in coming, but I’ve finally posted a few photos from one of Fred’s mudpuppy nights — in this case, from Feb. 7, 2004, when a squadron of herpers from the Toronto/Peterborough area descended on Oxford Mills to see the wonder that is amphibians active at subfreezing temperatures.

Fewer photos turned out than I had hoped: my incompetence with the camera meant that I had the water’s surface in focus most of the time. (But then I was shooting madly like a good news photographer, with similar results: 61 photos taken, six used.)

The female Baird’s rat snake, about which much concern and a trip to the vet this week, has died. This we did not expect; in fact, we thought she’d be on the upswing soon.

Also, one of the baby corn snakes we put into hibernation has died — the kinked anerythristic one that never once ate in its five months of existence. We thought that hibernation would reset its internal clock and make it want to eat in the spring, but it was apparently too far gone. The other one, however, is still fine, and we’ve just put the third baby into hibernation today — it’s had a few meals, mostly live, but has also stopped.

It’s never comfortable to report on snake fatalities. On the one hand, it’s an unfortunate and inevitable aspect of working with delicate animals. Sometimes, like the baby corn, which suffered from a major birth defect, they’re essentially doomed from birth. And sometimes, as in the case of the Baird’s, they’re acquired already sick and the symptoms aren’t necessarily conclusive. The Baird’s and her siblings were tiny for snakes of their age — even newborns a year younger would have been larger. Snakes are very difficult to diagnose: the breeders didn’t check for Strongyloides, and my first reaction was that the snake had been underfed rather than infested with nematodes. It can take a long time to realize that the snake needs a trip to the vet — and sometimes they die before there’s any indication that something’s wrong. I just thought we’d caught it in time this time. Damn.

On the other hand, I worry that being this open about things is setting myself up for random drive-by criticism from animal-care absolutists. I think talking about these things honestly will be useful for other people who are raising snakes, but as subcultures go, reptile keepers can be quite paranoid — sometimes with reason.

The Baird’s rat snake had internal parasites — specifically, Strongyloides. Treated with Flagyl and Panacur; will repeat Panacur in a couple of weeks. Fortunately not transmissable except via fecal contact so the rest of the collection ought to be fine. And once she’s clear of the little worms, she should start putting on some weight. She’s been eating well, but — as I guessed — the Strongyloides, which can inhabit the entire GI tract, were skimming the nutrition off the top. No wonder she’s so teensy.

On a happier note, our recalcitrant checkered garter snake has just eaten a half-pinky. Jennifer hypothesized that all the guts and goo might stimulate the appetite. I’m not sure if that’s what did it, but, what the hell, she ate. And I was on the cusp of hibernating her.

Vet appointment for the Baird’s rat snake on Thursday, which is pretty quick, comparatively speaking.

Our female Baird’s rat snake, which we picked up from John and Paula (via Kim) last September, isn’t looking so good. She was small and thin for her size when we got her; at the time we assumed that she just hadn’t been fed enough. But, three months later, she still looks small, even more gaunt than before, and listless. Now I’m beginning to think that it’s internal parasites — maybe a long-term infection that’s been siphoning off the nutrition and stunting her growth. Or something.

Time to call the vet and get a fecal sample done. If it is parasites, then treatment ought to be straightforward; with any luck she’ll start sprouting once she’s healthy again.

Knowing my luck, she’ll drop dead before we can get her to the vet, or it’ll be something much harder (and more expensive) to treat.

iTunes gets you laid (via Cult of Mac). Lots of other things get you laid too, apparently.

You’re all wrong. Snakes get you laid. I’m serious. On more than one occasion, while doing reptile displays, I’ve had a largeish snake out — a bullsnake or a black rat snake, for example — and have been surrounded by a group of reasonably young, attractive women. (Somewhere along the line things changed, and — anecdotally — it seems that more men are afraid of them now than women are, in all age groups.) Now nothing sordid came of that, of course, but even I could appreciate the ice-breaking potential. (Sorry Wes, but it seems to be a lot more effective than the “naked salamander dance of love” line. Snakes is cooler than newtses.)

But more importantly, it’s worth pointing out that I met Jennifer while holding a big black rat snake at an educational display. (As I like to say, she came over to the table with lust in her eyes — for the snake. Too bad it wasn’t one of mine.) So how about that?

An update on my last post on this subject. Hibernation is now officially under way: the two black pines went down yesterday. Last Thursday I finally found some low and wide 28 L Rubbermaid containers that were perfect for the task. It remained to melt holes in the sides with a soldering iron, add aspen and a water dish, and clip the lid down (it has locking handles, but I take no chances: we used a dozen clips apiece). Right now it’s 14°C in the hibernation area (about four feet away from where I’m sitting), a good temperature. We’ll check on them periodically, but otherwise they’re out of sight, out of mind until early March or so.

Meanwhile, the recalcitrant checkered garter did eat strips of fish fillet — our usual standby, ocean perch — on Saturday, as expected (see my section on problem feeders). Only to puke them back up again yesterday. For a while it looked like she was about to die on the spot, but she’s still with us this morning. Regurgitation in and of itself is not necessarily a problem, nor is it necessarily symptomatic of something more serious, but we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

We’d gotten the two checkered garters as insurance: they looked awfully small when we got them, and I wasn’t sure they’d survive. I thought that a year later they’d be over the hump, and I actually seriously considered offering this one for sale. Good thing we waited.

It’s snake hibernation time again, for the first time chez moi since the winter of 2001-2002. (Florence did the hibernating in 2002-2003; nobody was hibernated last winter.) As it turns out, the living room in our apartment is not well insulated — the floor is quite chilly — which makes the closet a great spot to stow chilling snakes.

So far, the adult corn snakes and gopher snakes have been put into hibernation. (For technical details, see my page about hibernation at Gartersnake.info, which describes what I do with all of my snakes.) The pine snakes will follow once I get large enough containers to hibernate them in.

We’ve also put the two non-feeding corn snake babies — one of which has never eaten in its 3½ months of existence — into hibernation, in the hope that their systems will be kick-started by the spring. (They’re even refusing live pinkies, so it’s this, force-feeding or letting them die.) Another possible candidate for hibernation is one of the two yearling checkered garters, which has refused her last two meals: first I’ll try kick-starting her appetite with fish fillet — sometimes offering a garter snake something other than mice can restore its urge to feed.

Between last month’s sales and the hibernators, feeding time will become quick and easy — for a while.

We’re almost sold out of snakes; at the moment, the only snake available is a single male Red-sided Garter Snake born in 2002.

On Thursday I bid farewell to the two and a half year old Great Basin Gopher Snake I’d been trying to sell for more than a year; it looks like he’s gone to a really good home with enthusiastic owners. And yesterday, at Grant’s show, I sold six of the seven snakes we had for sale, including all of the Wandering Garter Snakes and our last remaining Corn Snake from 2003. Where in hell did that come from?

Well, there was one buyer who took four on the spot. But I think the fact that the price list is now back online (previous entry) has something to do with it: greater visibility means more opportunities for sales. Certainly the gopher snake was sold off the web site, and I’ve had lots of inquiries from people who apparently did not move fast enough yesterday. (One left, guys! Hoof it!) The price list came down for a number of reasons, but this is ample proof that it should have stayed up.

I’ve been procrastinating again. I’ve been meaning to put some reptile photo albums online for some time, but I wanted to have a homegrown photo-gallery thingy — similar to that for Trails — running in the reptiles section. The hell with that: I’ll use my .Mac web space. To start with, here are photos from a June 2002 field trip to Murphy’s Point Provincial Park.

Between the Flickr stuff, putting up older photos, and the new photos associated with my father’s visit (more on which anon), expect an awful lot of photography in the near future.

The answers in this thread epitomize why I avoid reptile communities: it’s not worth it to get worked up about stupid people giving stupid advice. The problem is that it’s impossible to get people who know nothing about the subject to shut up. How Ask MetaFilter manages to stay useful is beyond me — maybe it’s because the average age is more than 14.

Finally: Gartersnake.info launches. It took me long enough. Now it’s … well, finished enough to show to the public. Lots still to fix and to do.

Northern Ribbon Snakes (Thamnophis sauritus septentrionalis) have been found in Quebec. They were observed for the first time in this province in 2003 — they were not known to exist here prior to that — when a population was found along the Quebec shore of the Ottawa River. Here’s a report of some subsequent observations of ribbon snakes in Quebec from this year. With pictures.

Another reptile show gone, another three snakes sold — a wandering garter, a red-sided garter, and a newborn corn snake with a kink in his spine that nonetheless was eating well. Sales about what I’d expected, though I’d hoped for more.

I’d raised the prices on the garter snakes a touch to reflect their age and size and no one complained — the people who really want garter snakes will pay a reasonable price; those that complain if I charge more than $20 wouldn’t have paid a lower price anyway.

We came back with three snakes, so we’re dead even in terms of mouths to feed: a new baby blue-striped garter snake; a yearling (albeit small for its age) female Baird’s rat snake, so we can pair up my male; and, from Stewart, a new Okeetee corn snake, because Jen likes them a lot.

Three corn snakes — a normal and two anerythristics — have hatched so far; we found them yesterday morning. There are still two or three apparently viable corn snake eggs that have yet to pip, as well as the black pine snake eggs. Anyone’s guess as to whether any more baby snakes are to come.

Meanwhile, Florence’s leucistic Texas rat snake has begun to lay eggs. There was breeding activity earlier this year, but it’s by no means certain that these eggs are fertile. And one of her corn snakes may yet double-clutch.

Fertility’s been lousy this year, but it doesn’t mean that egg-laying is over yet.

1. We sold the last of the 2002 corn snakes yesterday: a male who didn’t want to eat frozen/thawed mice for the first six months of his life, but has since come on like gangbusters; he’s small as a result of that, and the fact that Pretzel is his mother (she’s kind of small herself).
2. It looks like the corn snake born earlier this year has a kink in his spine. Drat. I thought he looked a little misshapen at that. Anyone want a slightly deformed baby corn snake that is nevertheless eating just fine?
3. Three clutches in the incubator that are due to hatch in the next couple of weeks, but none of them are looking good. At this stage I’ll be surprised if anything hatches at all (it’s always good to keep your expectations low, but still). Not a good year.

There’s a new mailing list for Pituophis keepers — Pituophis means bull, pine and gopher snakes. It’s been set up because the original bull, pine and gopher snake list (here) seems to have been abandoned and is being plagued by spam.

The gopher snakes, on the other hand, don’t seem to feel like eating at all. I was concerned that the male may not be eating because he’s stressed out by the presence of the female — they’re housed together — and she’s been known to nip at him every now and then. He’s finickier than she is — it’s a snake male thing — but now neither of them are eating. (Update: She ate eventually.)

My current working theory is that they’ve gone into aestivation. We’ve had them on extra heat because we were concerned about their digestion. They’re from B.C. stock, so they may not be as comfortable with the heat. We’ll see. Inappetance is one of the most common health issues with snakes, and there are about a zillion reasons why a snake won’t eat.

Meanwhile, I just had a quick look in the incubator. Little Guy’s eggs have collapsed a bit — at least the ones I can see — and there’s mould growing in there. A sign that at least some of the eggs are no good. Only one of Ruby’s four eggs looks good — it also looks huge. No change on Lilith’s eggs: two white eggs, a little dry and dimpled but reasonably good nonetheless, and one smaller egg going greyish-brown.

Not a fecund year by any stretch, but that was expected.

It’s now safe to say that after nearly four years, my two Butler’s garter snakes have overcome the shyness that is inherent to the species. The hungry little fuckers were trying to eat my fingers tonight — I narrowly avoided being the only person on the planet ever to be bitten by a Butler’s garter.

Just sent the following letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail about this article about the comeback of the American alligator, which I would have enjoyed more if it had been a bit more accurate.

William Illsey Atkinson’s article about the comeback of the American alligator (“He’s Back,” July 3) contains two statements of fact that require correction and clarification.

First, to say that alligators consider their own offspring a delicacy, or that they practice cannibalism as a form of crocodilian birth control, is not quite accurate. Alligator mothers guard their nests and protect their young for the first year; the young alligators will call for their mother when they feel threatened. Crocodilians are among the few reptiles that show parental care. Alligator males, on the other hand, have no such compunctions, and will certainly prey on younger, smaller alligators if they are abundant, even if they are blood relations — and that might serve, indirectly and unintentionally, as population control. Perhaps that is what Mr. Atkinson meant, but the article may leave a different impression.

Second, calling alligators omnivores is at the very least ambiguous: they are omnivores in the gustatory sense (in that they will eat all manner of animals, including fish, molluscs, reptiles, birds and mammals), but they are not omnivores in the strict biological sense. Like all modern crocodilians, they are decidedly carnivorous.

Atkinson is apparently a technology consultant; what’s he doing writing about alligators? (Then again: what’s an historian like me doing messing around with snakes? Fair enough.)

More on the American alligator.

Florence reports that Ruby, her snow corn snake, is laying eggs right now. Four have been laid so far as of this moment, with number five imminent. She got to see number three coming out — a fascinating process, according to Florence. Assuming all goes well, Ruby’s eggs will hatch into either amelanistic (red albino) corns or a 50-50 mix of amels and snows, depending on which male got to her first.

This is as good a place to reiterate the updates from the previous thread on this subject. Of Lilith’s (black pine snake) three eggs, two still look good; the smaller one is discoloured and is almost certainly not viable. Little Guy (anerythristic motley corn snake) laid at least 10 eggs — I can count 10, but am not certain if more are not hiding underneath. Some are dimpling, collapsing a bit already. We’ll find out about these eggs for certain around mid-August, when they’re due to hatch, more or less.

Finally, the single baby normal corn snake has eaten its second meal without incident tonight.

A thread describing how to ship reptiles by domestic air freight in Canada. For future reference.

The Iron Chef is offering one dish. The bitterness of the organic mixed greens is gently scented by the slime of the chopped nightcrawler, while the grated carrot and chard add essential nutrients for a growing turtle.

Tasting: The turtle ate the nightcrawler pieces but ignored the veggies. A bitter defeat for the Iron Chef!

Epilogue: When the turtle was finished eating her worms, we added a chopped strawberry to her plate and put her in it. She turned to clomp away, stopped, did a double take, and went back to eat the new treats. Though this morning most of the strawberry pieces were still there. Box turtles are finicky beasts, even when you’re trying to convert them to a more vegetarian diet at the age of three.

Back to you, Fukui-san.

The verdict on the Newmarket reptile show, where we peddled our wares on Saturday: “rather weak”. Crowds were light and for some vendors sales were even lighter. Some (like us) didn’t sell anything, though others were luckier.

In fact, some vendors left partway through, presumably fed up with the light crowds. But I’ve been to enough of the smaller shows (i.e., not Grant’s) to know that small crowds, heavily weighted towards local curiosity seekers rather than serious reptile buyers, are to be expected. In any event, the lack of a crush made it less hectic and more pleasant.

Continue reading this entry »

It has turned out that the one baby hatched so far from Pretzel’s clutch will be the only one from that clutch. No other eggs hatched, so Jen pipped the ones that were supposedly viable yesterday. Fully formed snakes, but definitely dead — and with enough yolk remaining in the egg that it cannot have been recently. Which means that pipping them earlier wouldn’t have made a difference.

Meanwhile, Lilith (female black pine snake) is looking positively pendulous. She’s past due and I hope she lays them very soon. A trip to the vet for a dose of vasotocin would be expensive. Since Lucifer (mate) was occupying the nesting box all the time, we’ve temporarily removed him from the cage. Crossing fingers.

Also, Florence reports that Little Guy (female anerythristic motley corn snake) is also hugely gravid, past due and not dropping eggs yet. Can we get vasotocin in bulk?

[Edit: Updates in the comments.]

For last Sunday’s reptile show, we decided to drive down in one shot. By getting up at 3 a.m. instead of coming down the day before, we got less sleep in exchange for less stress, and got our Saturday back, too. But man was I tired on the drive back that night. Yesterday was essentially spent catching up on the sleep; like food and sex, sleep feels fantastic when you’ve been deprived of it for a while.

Anyway. Wasn’t a bad show. We sold a couple of ceramics and three more red-sided garters, so we came out ahead for the first time in a long while. Smaller crowds but a smaller proportion of curiosity-seekers. Some definite interest from people who I think were this close to buying, too — and I can relate, since between the rough-scaled sand boas, trinket snakes, Trans-Pecos rat snake and the pair of sauromates, I was coveting about a thousand bucks of snake meat myself.

Steve got his head shaved by raising $2,000+ for the Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre. I didn’t take my camera, figuring that there would be plenty of shutterbugs present, but the bastards haven’t gotten round to posting theirs yet! [Edit: Here they are!]

Next up is the show in Newmarket this Saturday. We’ll get up early to drive down to it as well; I think that will be standard procedure for shows from here on in. I just need to figure out how to get to sleep: nothing like insomnia just before having to get up frickin’ early. It’s the only time I can’t get to sleep.

It looks like some of Pretzel’s eggs were viable after all, because they’ve begun to hatch. One baby had pipped as of yesterday and as of now has hatched. More or less right on time, too — they were laid on April 16 and at the time I’d guessed at a hatch date around June 11 or so. These things are never exactly precise.

We’ll find out soon enough how many other eggs end up hatching. Once these are done, there won’t be anything else for a while, since no other snake has laid eggs yet. (Pretz was really early this year.) But Little Guy (normal and anerythristic corns) and Lilith (black pines) are probably gravid at the moment, and I suspect they’ll be producing eggs any day now. I’d dearly love to produce black pine snakes again this year.

Spent all of yesterday redesigning the Pelee Island field trip site and moving it to a new URL at ontarioherpers.org/pelee. Now it’s finished, albeit a year behind schedule. There are still a few minor things to take care of, but now it’s essentially time to get some new content up. I’ve added my photos from 2001, which were posted to a bulletin board that has since eliminated the archives for the period, and I’ve got my photos from this year to add as well. And I’ve got to harass the other attendees for their photos.

It looks like only four of Pretzel’s nine eggs have any hope of hatching; the rest are collapsing or going mouldy. (Fortunately mould does not affect adjacent good eggs.) I suspect this has something to do with the fact that they weren’t hibernated — it probably affected fertility on both sides — but then again, her second clutch last year didn’t turn out that well, either.

In related news, Pretzel surprised us with nine apparently viable eggs on Friday. Laid on the glass floor of her cage. Even though it’s early for her — breeding was early too because we didn’t hibernate anyone this year — we should still have seen it coming: she had stopped eating and was pacing her cage frantically, both of which are symptomatic of a snake about to lay eggs. Oh well: no harm, no foul. She’s fine and the eggs are now in the incubator. Expected hatch date: some time around June 11.

Meanwhile, the black pine snakes — which didn’t breed last year — were making whoopie in their cage on Monday. This is a good thing: unlike most of the snakes we breed, black pine snakes sell well for good prices. They’re great snakes, of course, which is the whole point. Crossing my fingers.

Despite the fact that we sold a total of one ceramic dragon at Sunday’s reptile show, I was relatively pleased. For one thing, the new locale is fantastic: huge, with a high ceiling, with room for bigger tables and bigger crowds. (Which we got; it was just as packed as the old, smaller location, which is not a bad thing. The fact that the crowds weren’t buying was another issue.) For another, I was really pleased with how our own table looked:

As for the disappointing sales, I could have been marketing the stuff more aggressively than I have; when I sold more at these shows several years ago, I had a more prominent online presence. Viz., my reptile section had pricelists and descriptions. I’ve taken those down pending the launch of a commercial reptile site at a separate address; I’m working on that new site now and hope to have it up soon.

In any event, I’ve noticed that people browsing at one show sometimes purchase one or two shows later. On the one hand, I’m optimistic for the June show as a result, because there was some definite interest. On the other hand, this can be somewhat annoying, as they’re assuming that the same stuff will be there the next time. But it’s a buyer’s market right now: we need to sell more than they need to buy, and we need to deal with that fact.

I’ve also got some ideas for the next show that I hope I can get done in time.

I’ve always had this lingering fear that the Species at Risk Act, now law, would have some impact on me, since I keep species that are legal to keep in my current province but protected elsewhere — viz., my Butler’s Garter Snakes (which I kept under licence when I was living in Ontario) and my Great Basin Gopher Snakes (which I acquired before they were listed by COSEWIC). At the same time, I’ve been kind of avoiding having a look and seeing for sure. Which is strange, seeing as how I used to read and edit laws and regulations for a living: if any non-lawyer in the reptile community could figure this out, it’d be me, wouldn’t it?

Since I’m trying to sell a juvenile gopher snake at the moment (more on which anon), I needed to know whether or not keeping and selling a species that was protected in another province was kosher. So tonight, finally, I had a look at the relevant page on the Department of Justice’s laws site. And nearly fell out of my chair until I figured out what the Act was saying.

First it said, in subsection 32(2), that possession or sale of an extirpated, endangered or threatened species was prohibited. Uh-oh! But then it took it all back, more or less, in section 34, which states that that prohibition only applies on federal lands unless an Order-in-Council is issued that makes it apply everywhere in a given province. Essentially the Act applies on federal Crown lands only (and to migratory birds and other wildlife under federal jurisdiction, but that’s not relevant here); it can be extended if the federal government thinks that provincial wildlife protections aren’t up to snuff — it’s a fail-safe, in other words. Provincial endangered species and conservation laws are the first line of defence.

It’s highly unlikely that the federal government will issue an order affecting wildlife native to B.C. and Ontario that applies to Quebec residents.

Not only that, but the gopher snake isn’t even listed in the schedules (which lag somewhat behind COSEWIC’s own listings), and section 32 doesn’t even come into force until June 1.

So as usual, I needn’t worry. Nor, it appears, should anyone who keeps in captivity species that are protected in their native province, but legal where they are.

Stephanie and her mother are trying to put together a Snake Awareness Day, which April 17 has been designated as. To that end, Stephanie is putting together a web site at snakeawareness.com, which is only a rough mockup at the moment and needs donated content. Says Stephanie: “What we need is information pertaining to snake conservation and/or pics of your snakes. If you have good rescue/conservation stories to share, please send them to me. This is a group project and everyone who participates will be given credit.”

Also check out the snake conservation mailing list.

Amorous activity in the corn snake tank this morning. Trouser, as usual, is living up to his namesake, pestering poor Pretzel. He even shed his skin in the process — all that rubbing and moving around, I suppose. (Last year’s antics were recorded here: 1, 2, 3.)

I hibernated no snakes this winter, which should discourage breeding this year, but it still doesn’t surprise me that the corn snakes are going at it — it’s about a month earlier than it would have been had they been hibernated. I would be surprised — pleasantly — if the Pituophis did anything, though. (Black pine snakes are expensive and sell well, heh.)

Timber rattlesnakes can identify their siblings by scent, according to a new study that adds a bit more evidence to the notion that snakes — “often regarded as the least social of all vertebrates” — might be more social than we thought. Add that to the tendency of snakes — rattlers, garters, ringnecks — to agglomerate when basking or hibernating, and the evidence that, for example, newborn black-tailed rattlers hang around their mothers for the first two weeks after birth.

Now here’s the question: if snakes can recognize siblings by scent, what are they thinking when reptile keepers breed related pairs?

And now, how about a garter snake tribe? I just couldn’t help myself.

Reptile tribes are proliferating across Tribe.net, but none of them have many members. It’s as much due to the fact that there aren’t many reptile keepers on that site — as opposed to tattooed polyamorist Burning Man devotees — as it is to fragmentation. Herewith a list of the tribes I know about; some don’t have a public URL and must be searched for from the site.

• Boas
• Giant Pythons
• Herpetologists in General
• Pythons
• Reptile Lovers Unite
• Snakes
• Venomous Reptiles

Social-networking sites rely on the network effect to take off — i.e., the more people are on it, the better it gets. So it’ll take a while before these tribes come into their own.

I’m overdue in mentioning this, but it’s now known that the reticulated python first reported to be 15 metres (49 feet) long (see previous entry) is actually somewhat smaller — 6.5 metres (or 21½ feet). As I suspected.

A bevy of small improvements to the site today as I procrastinate more important tasks, including a revamp of the garter snake care page, which now has something above and beyond the downloadable PDF — links to sites and books about garters. At some point it will be replaced with the large-scale garter snake information site that I’ve been planning, off and on, for over three years, but at least this blows the dust off of what’s already there.

The OHS may be defunct, but there is a herp club in my old neck of the woods: the Manitoba Herpetocultural Society — not that I know anything beyond the web site.

A 15-metre, 450-kg reticulated python is reportedly on display at a village zoo in Indonesia (Google News search). That would shatter the records for longest and heaviest recorded snake. But I’m extremely skeptical of this report for several reasons. One, it’s about 17 feet longer than the documented record for this species. Two, it’s been publicized before it’s been confirmed — I smell a scheme to get rich off credulous tourists. And three, everyone exaggerates snakes’ length, because it’s impossible for the inexperienced to eyeball it — how many six-foot garter snakes have been reported?

Lisa points to this column in the Star-Telegram of Dallas-Fort Worth, in which Jerry Abrams writes, based on his own experience, about what is patently obvious to those in the know, and a revelation to everyone else: snakes just want to be left alone.

It’s not a reptilian Golgotha over here, though you might think otherwise given my propensity to report every damn casualty in our reptile collection here. (And when you remove parasite-infested and neonate garter snakes and high-risk ringnecks from the equation, we’re doing very well over here, thankyouverymuch.)

This time it was the crested gecko, which Jen picked up a bit more than 13 months ago. He had essentially stopped eating, though we don’t know yet whether that’s the cause of death or merely a symptom of the cause. We’ll look into it. Lizard-keeping is quite different from snake-keeping; it’s not as straightforward, frankly. For example, he died fast by my standards — quicker than I could figure out what was wrong. Sigh.

Back from a reptile expo weekend in Toronto, where, naturally, we sold hardly anything — three garters for me, two corns for Florence, and Jen only sold a ceramic because some eager-handed little terror broke it. At least Jenny sold some boa constrictors. I’m getting inured to slow sales at these shows: I think it’s a result of too many vendors — lots of breeders selling at the show who’ve been at it for less time than even I have — chasing too few customers with too little money and too many animals already. At some point the economics of it will shake out some of the breeders and supply will start to approach demand again, but in the meantime it’s going to be a lean time.