It's About Time

I have been quite worried about the new snake, as it was not wanting to eat and it's been almost two weeks since it arrived in the mail. I tried just about everything I could to get it to eat, but it would run away from or just ignore the food. A few nights ago I even tried putting a live pinky in the cage to see if it would take that. No dice, so I wound up having to kill the pinky rather than let it die a slow death by starvation.

Tonight I saw the snake moving around a couple of times, which is supposedly a signal of hunger. So I got a mouse out of the freezer, thawed and warmed it, and presented it to the snake with some hopefully realistic wriggling motion. At first the snake started to pull back away from it, but when I began bumping the mouse's head against the snake's tail he grabbed onto it and coiled up around it. I wiggled the mouse a bit while the snake had it gripped and that seemed to trigger a little more aggression in the snake. Then I left the snake alone for a while so it wouldn't get spooked before it swallowed the food. I checked once as it was getting the mouse situated and the next time I checked it had burrowed back down into the substrate with a nice little bump in it's belly. So now I at least know the snake will feed.