Egg eating snake

[ConcinusMan]

She I am looking into a pair of captive born calabar burrowing pythons. call me crazy, but they are certainly one of the oddest looking snakes out there! And I do plan to be the queen of oddball snakes....

Those things are so fugly!

[Mix]

Spankenstyne, thank you so much for that info! I had read about using the fake nest, and as I said before, I'm (hopefully) getting hold of a rather tall viv, so there'd be plenty of room for a fake 'tree' area to put it in.

To be honest, I was starting to think that the dangers of non-feeding might be cause to give it a miss, but your experience has shown it may not always be an issue. I too had suspicions that husbandry and unhappiness on the part of the snake may be the reason some of them do not seem to eat. I also read that eggs could be left in for up to two days?

I really have to think on this one, and also check what size eggs it is currently eating, as I don't yet know of a local source for the smallest eggs (finch etc).

[Mix]

Oh, and the calabar pythons are strangely cute! They look like earthworms made out of mahogany.

[Spankenstyne]

No problem. I had heard the same thing about the eggs and early on would throw them out after 2 days. It was after accidently leaving some in for just over 3 days and then having both eaten that I decided to ignore that.

Now when I feed I pretty much leave the eggs in until eaten. If it takes a couple/few days to eat then I normally skip the following week's feeding since it's around mid-week by then. If they started to look or smell obviously bad then I would certainly throw them out, fortunately I don't recall having had to do that yet.

I usually get a bunch of eggs at a time and put them in the fridge & take a couple out at a time for feeding (or more if you're leaving a couple/few weeks between feedings). Sometimes mine will only take an egg one day then the other a day later but a couple of eggs weekly worked well all last summer. I was concerned about keeping eggs for too long but had some in the fridge for a month at one point and they ended up getting eaten no problem, so you can keep them for a while refrigerated. I found that it seems to work better also to not clean off the eggs too much even if there's a bit of bird poop on them. I've seen some places say you have to wash the eggs beforehand, which made little sense to me since nobody is washing them in the wild. They're equipped to deal with it & I think the stronger scent might even be more attractive to them.

On a side note... Calabars are awesome. Richard just hates anything that doesn't have the word concinnus in the name

[Mix]

That sounds good.
After reading the info about the snake, it says it is an 80cm female, so I'm guessing that would be adult (or not far off)? It also says she is eating quail eggs, so that would not be a worry.
I think we're edging toward getting it. Just want to make sure I can get the tall viv, and then that it's definitely the right decision.
Thanks so much for your advice, it really has helped to clear things up!

[Stefan-A]

Can't you freeze eggs?

[Mix]

I don't know, but there is a store about 10 minutes from home that sells quail eggs, so it hopefully shouldn't be a problem.

[Spankenstyne]

Can't you freeze eggs?

I don't know, haven't tried. I would be worried about the liquid expanding and cracking the egg. They don't seem to take already broken eggs.


Mix, sounds like it's already well established & an adult or close to which should make things easier. I don't know that the "nest" is necessarily needed, but I do tend to feed from there mainly and mine spends most of it's time near there. I've had some eggs fall out and still get eaten and I also have put some at the base of the plant and have them also get eaten. It's not as picky as I was expecting.

[Hornets23]

Looks pretty cool!

[aSnakeLovinBabe]

Oh my gosh!!! Those pictures just brightened my day. Your snake is SO cute!!!