The snake era is over

Today marked the end of an era for us.

In 2000, shortly before we bought our house in San Bernardino, we got our first snake, Alef. A few months later we acquired another snake, and then another, and then... Well, you get the picture. Before long, we got quite deeply into breeding corn snakes and enjoyed this hobby a lot.

When we moved to Israel (at the end of 2005), we got all the necessary permits and brought more than 30 snakes with us, including about 13 or 14 siblings from a breeding project that we had started a couple of years before that when we bred a male Emory rat snake (another subspecies of corn snakes) to a female lavender corn snake. The project came to fruition in the summer of 2007, when we produced our first "fire opal" snakes. These are both lavender and amelanistic (with Emory amelanism, NOT corn snake amelanism, which is a different gene). They are pinkish white with only faint saddles. We produced 3 or 4 that year, but only 1 (a beautiful female!) survived eventually. In 2008, we produced some more, but again only 1 (this time a male) survived. We also produced a number of amelanistic and lavender babies, of course. This year, we only had two clutches of eggs, and not a single egg was good.

One of our main problems here is that it's really too cold. Despite the fact that each cage has a heating pad on the bottom of it at one end, we really have not been keeping it warm enough for the snakes. As a result, they tend to quit eating too early in the Fall, and we can't bring them up from their brumation early enough in the Spring. Although they are SUPPOSED to go without food for two or three months, ours have sometimes essentially not eaten for 4, 5, and even 6 months a year, resulting in a number of deaths. Until this past Spring, we had a rack system with drawers and heating strips at the back. Because they were more enclosed in it, they could keep warm enough there even in the winter. But there was only enough space for the babies. The heating system failed in the rack this year, and we could not afford to have it checked and replaced (the rack was built by a guy in the San Diego area, from whom we had bought it years ago).

So, we had already been cutting down the number of snakes in our collection, selling most of them. Finally, we realized that we simply could not afford to continue this hobby at all anymore. So I called our friend, Golan, who keeps and breeds snakes (and a number of other animals) at his facility on Kibbutz Matzuba, nearly Shlomi and not far from Nahariya. I told Golan that we would give him the 12 remaining snakes that we had, and we arranged to take them over there today. I also gave him the rest of the frozen mice that we had.

Our final inventory was: 2 males and 2 females from the project (hybrids, all heterzygous for both Emory amelanism and corn snake lavender), 1 normal male corn snake (het for snow, i.e. both amelanism and anerythrism, and a good proven breeder but impossible to sell because he has lots of bumps on him!), 1 female "fire opal", 2 male amelanistic hybrids (one of which is so skinny that he probably won't make it), a female amelansitic hybrid, a pair of lavender hybrids, and a male "fire opal".

Although snake breeding has been a fun hobby for us, it's now time for us to move on. The reduced expense (by not having to buy mice and not heating the snakes) will help our budget a bit. I'll miss seeing them every week when I feed them and clean their cages, but I'll also have one less thing to do each week. And, of course, when we really want to see some snakes, we can always visit Golan's! :-)