Alice the Bullsnake

Just finished cleaning Alice’s water bowl and spot cleaning her habitat. She should be shedding soon.

Alice is in her shed cycle right now. I will feed her once she completes it.

I started out by trying a brown small rat that Alice was interested in however she did not try to eat it. I then offered her a white mouse that she snapped up. I offered her a second mouse that she also devoured. I took the next mouse and used it to scent the brown rat. I offered her the scented rat and she ate it and followed that with the mouse I used to scent the rat. Maybe I can get her to eat a medium rat next week if I use a mouse to scent it first.

Alice accepted her first medium rat since the end of January today. It was just 102g, however that is twice as large as the the small rats she was accepting. I am hoping her diet is returning to normal. I was beginning to think I was going to have to sell the rats in the freezer and place an order of small rats.

Alice refused a medium rat on Tuesday. I fed her 2 large mice and one small rat today. Overall feeding response was much better than last week. I will continue to offer her a medium rat first on future feedings. Maybe next week I will try two small rats if she refuses the medium.

The Herpstat ND is working out very well. I really like the drop in temps at night without having to turn the heat completely off. The temp alarm is also very nice and will help me to stay on top of heat failures.

Also, while talking about her environment, the best solution I have found to add humidity to her environment is a cool mist humidifier next to her habitat. I ordered a Safety 1st 360 degree model from Target online. I only have to use it part of the time and it is compact and does a great job. I try to keep her humidity around 30 to 40 percent.

So I did get Alice to eat today by offering her smaller meal items. She refused a medium rat first and later accepted a small rat and two large mice. This was her first meal in a little over three weeks. I am sure she will return to appropriately sized meal items as Spring moves in.

I found out yesterday that the thermostat in Alice’s habitat had quit working. I wanted to move up to a pulse proportional type and narrowed my choice down to either a Herpstat ND or a Helix DBS-1000. I really liked the 7 year warranty that the DBS-1000 has and its use by many zoos. In the end though, I decided to go with the Herpstat ND because of the built-in night drop feature instead of the Helix’s add-on trigger. I hope it gets here before the end of the week.

I offered Alice a large mouse and she snapped that right up. I am going to offer her a smaller rat as well in hopes she will take it.

I decided to take Alice to the vet to make sure that there was nothing wrong causing her to miss meals. She shed on 2/14 and refused a rat on 2/15 even though it had been 2 1/2 weeks since her last meal. Prior to December of last year she had a very strong feeding response. Since then she has become very picky and eating every ten days on average. She weighed in at 2.23Kg today. I am waiting for her to defecate again so I can take that in to make sure there are no parasites. Other than that, she checked out just fine. She is hiding now and I probably will not see her for a while. It was not a fun day for her.

Also, I decided to switch the lighting I use for her. I have been using a compact florescent light from the start with her. I had read reports that some do emit UVB light. To make sure she is getting what she needs, I switched to a 2.0 series florescent light from Exo Terra.

WooHoo. Woke up this morning to see that Alice had shed in the middle of the
night as usual. Rat dinner tomorrow 🙂