Alice the Bullsnake

It seems Alice has decided that she likes a 10 day feeding schedule now that she is approaching 3 years old. I offered her a rat six days after her last meal and she did not touch it. It was really just kind of a test since she had started waiting longer than a week between meals. I just wanted to make sure she was not hungry.

Running the humidifier in the office where I keep her in the winter has helped to make both her and us more comfortable. Humidity stays in the 30’s range in her habitat and she seems to be more relaxed. Until I added this Flukers temp/humidity digital meter to her habitat, I had no idea the air was so dry in the house during the winter. I have it on the cool end of her habitat.

Keeping the humidity up is such a challenge in the winter. I had been keeping a tray of damp sphagnum moss in her habitat to keep the humidity up. That had not been keeping it out of the single digits recently. As a result, I had to put the humidifier back in front of her habitat this week. It’s up to 29% + in her habitat now and that will be high enough to help her with her upcoming shed.

It has been 8 days since Alice’s last meal. I wanted to go ahead and feed her today as I suspect she is close to going into another shed cycle. She ate the large mouse and refused the medium rat. Her change in attitude towards eating rats is very frustrating. I thought we were making progress there.

Alice continues to be more cautious eating rats. She had one large mouse and one medium rat today for a total of 136g of rodent. I currently feed her the mouse first to get the feed mode fired up and then follow a half hour later with the rat. Again, she would not take the rat while I held it and waited until I placed it on the floor of the feeding bin. Once she found it, she bit and released it several times to make sure it was not alive. When I returned about an hour later the rat had been consumed. Right now she is peeking over the top of her feeding bin at me while I type this. A camera is never handy when you want it most 🙁

About a couple of weeks ago Alice refused a meal. She struck at it a time or two and then pretty much ignored it. I did get her to eat a few days later, however it was after a couple of false starts in swallowing the rat. The next time I went to feed her, again there was the hesitation and then she swallowed the rat up to its shoulders and spit it out.

After consulting with the vet., I decided to give it another try and if she did the same thing, I would take her into the vet to get checked out to see what is going on. So, four days passed after the last attempt and I decided to try giving her a large mouse first and then follow that with a medium rat. She immediately snapped the mouse up and gulped it down. A 19g mouse is nothing for a close to 6 foot Bull Snake to eat and it was gone in a flash. I allowed her to settle down for about 30 minutes and presented the rat to her. She carefully smelled of the rat and finally struck at it once and knocked it out of my hands. She pinned it against the side of the feeding bin and I patiently waited to see if she would swallow it. After several nerve racking minutes, I could see her head moving around in the feeding bin. A cautious glance revealed that the rat was indeed missing from view.

So, I thought for a while what might have caused this sudden wariness when getting offered a rat. She has always had pre-killed, frozen rodents as her source of food and never could have suffered an injury from a prey item. Then it occurred to me that it had to be related to how I presented the rat to her. I always hold them by the tail and hold it near her head where she can smell it and she grabs it out of my hand. The last time I fed her, before all of this started, she had partially come out of her bin to grab the rat and I used the tail of the rat to pull her upper body back into the feeding bin. Maybe it just coincidence, however I think that had something to do with this behavior.

For the next few feedings, I will offer her the large mouse first to get her into feeding mode and follow up with the medium rat. I hope this gets her past her wariness and she returns to her normal, aggressive feeding response.

I went back to a white rat on Sunday for Alice. She struck at it at first and did not grab the rat. She seemed very interested in it though. I placed the rat on the floor or her feeding bin and closed the lid. I watched her make several attempts to start swallowing the rat and she would stop and let go of it. She did finally grab it in a way that she could swallow it. I am hoping that she is past whatever was bothering her now and she will resume her usual feeding response.

Alice did not eat today as I had planned. The rat was almost completely black and maybe it was just that she is used to white rats. She did bite it a couple of times and let go without trying to position it for swallowing. The other thought is that she was fed five days ago. She seems hungry and is very active. I will have to wait until Sunday to try again. I will go back to a white rat at that time.