Last weekend saw us add one of our favourite royal morphs to our home - a VPI axanthic female. This girl is another Scottish bred royal, coming from Bob Simpson & Derek Rintoul’s top quality breeding group, and is a delightful little snake.
We’ve named her Blackberry in honour of her rich deep black colouring, and in keeping with our current naming theme.
It has been a busy few months, and I’m sorry to say that this blog hasn’t seen an update since August so this post is a kind of “catch up” of the last few months.
The end of August saw Barzona’s clutch of eggs hatch. We had twenty eggs and ended up with nineteen hatchlings: some normals, some hypos, some cinders, and the UK’s first hypo cinder, all pure Upper Keys locality. The hatchlings are all thriving and growing well; we are holding back both the male hypo cinder, and a female hypo Upper Keys for our own breeding program.
Our royal hatchlings, now all feeding and established, continued to thrive and went off to their new homes during September and October, along with most of the corns from our earlier clutches. We have held back a few, of course - Cranberry’s genetic banded spider boy Sheldon stayed with us, Lingonberry’s as-yet-unnamed daughter, and two female fires from Strawberry’s clutch as well.
We’ve bought a few new snakes this year, and have been very lucky to get some beautiful specimens who are not only beautiful and loving pet snakes, but also from excellent bloodlines and likely to produce top quality offspring one day. Our new additions this season have been a little genetic mystery male corn snake, Wallaroo our female woma python, and Spike an abberant pinstripe royal python. We’re still awaiting the arrival of a new locality corn snake pair from the US, who should be with us soon.
Sadly, we have also said goodbye to some of our snakes this year. Carol, one of our original corn snakes died earlier in the year at around age 14. Carol was the mother of our first clutch of corns, and without her who knows if we’d have ended up with all the snakes we have now! We also lost my darling Pongo in a tragic accident; he was a snake in a million, and I still cannot quite find the words to speak about him.
This is really the end of the year as far as snakes go. This weekend the older corn snakes and hognoses go into brumation to prepare themselves for next breeding season, which will make the house seem a bit quieter. We are currently working on our 2009 breeding plans, and we’ll be posting the details up once it’s finished so we can accept reservations on next year’s babies.
Today the first baby pipped from Cranberry’s clutch of six eggs, and it looks to be another spider.
I did get to see a bit more of it out of the egg, but it’s a shy wee thing and pulled back into the egg when I went to take photos. Hopefully the other five will pip soon so we can see what we’ve got.
From the other fertile egg incubated from Hussy, we have our second royal hatchling, our first royal python morph:
it has an interesting pattern, quite a few “alien heads”, perhaps the effect of the granite gene in Hussy.
I cut one of Hussy’s eggs last night - it had collapsed in an odd manner, and to be honest I thought it was dead. It took a while to carefully cut round the veins on the egg as delicately as possible, and in the end I could see a fully formed normal royal python through the small hole, but no movement.
A couple of hours later, I returned to see this:
He/she looks absolutely perfect, I imagine he’ll stay in the egg for a few more days until he’s ready to come into the outside world, and hopefully by then his sibling from Hussy’s other egg will have pipped too. I am over the moon with this - our first ever royal python baby!
All of the fires and bloodreds from Strawberry’s clutch have hatched and shed now - there are a variety of different looks in the clutch from very diffused from the beginning to a few who are less diffused but have more extreme head patterns. We have ended up with eleven fires and nine bloodreds, and although they’re not all sexed yet it looks like we have more females than males.
Their first feed went fine - not as good as the lavenders, but quite respectable. As they’re big hatchlings I expected some of them to refuse before they finally take a defrost pink, and I was quite right! Still, half of them fed without any hesitation so that’s not bad at all.
I’ll put some pictures and details of the ones who are started up on the website as soon as I can, and add the rest of them once they decide they’re hungry and take some food!
It was feeding night for the majority of the snakes last night - our yearlings are all on a weekly schedule, and the adults all either get fed once a week or once every two weeks, so I tend to feed the youngsters while stan feeds the adults.
The vast majority of the yearlings are a breeze to feed, and strike happily at their food (notably excepting Jacob, who prefers to politely take the food from your hand). Loads were freshly shed and particularly gorgeous looking, Shetland in particular who is gaining the most incredible amounts of delicate pink colouring.
Cranberry, Hussy, and Lingonberry, our royal girls, got fed last night too - they’re getting fed more often than usual at the moment as they’ve all laid recently and are looking a bit skinny. Cranberry and Hussy both laid clutches amounting to 1/3 of their total body weight, so they look exhausted (not that you’d know it from the power of their striking when they feed!). Lingonberry’s clutch was proportionately much smaller, less than 1/5 of her total body weight, so she still looks quite healthy - but while she’s acting hungry, we’ll let her eat!
It was hatchling feeding night last night. Second feed for half of the lavender clutch, and first feed for the rest of them - all but one ate defrost without any problems. I’m really pleased that the first clutch Sebastian’s sired has proved to be such strong feeders, like he was as a baby.
Raspberry seems to be going into slough (I say “seems to be” as I find it really hard to tell with her sometimes). I really expected her to lay this year, so I’m hoping that this is finally her pre-lay slough. She’s been mated to Sebastian for lavenders het hypo opal, so fingers crossed there.
I am finally seeing veins in most of Barzona’s eggs now. There’s a couple I’m not sure on yet, and of course they’re in a big clump so I can’t get to the bottom ones, but I think they’re doing well. I can’t wait to see if a little cinder pops its head out of one of those eggs!