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.