The first 4 weeks of garter keeping

[Char361979]

I put some more food in the viv containing our reluctant eater and the girl that won't eat at all last night. Nothing doing. All of it was still there this morning. Our viv containing the healthy girls is suprisingly quiet. Lightning has made an appearance but Binky and Eskarina are hiding. I'm not suprised. Binky is in shed and seems to like to stay well hidden and Eskarina is her shadow. Wherever Binks is Esk is nearly always curled up with her.

[katach]

My red stripe NW never comes out of the hide while she is in shed. She loses the shed in the middle of the night. It's like she is saying don't look at me, I'm ugly. Even though that is far from the truth, she is gorgeous!

[chris-uk]

An update on our girls, and boy. We're convinced that Eskerina is going to need a name change (ironic when you know the Discworld novel that Eskerina is the main character in). With all our talk recently being about our new Mexican pair we still haven't forgotten the checkereds.

Binky is doing great, we think we need to cut back her feeding as she's taking one piece each time and then not interested in more. We offer her food each time we feed Lightning as they're in together. Lightning has a great strike on her, and will take the food from the tongs before we get it close to her.
In the second checkered viv we have Esk, who eats well and is growing nicely, and as they are currently in the bedroom he is often up and looking around to say good morning when I get up. And Bethan is in the same viv, who eats badly and isn't growing that quick. Today was a breakthrough with Bethan as she ate when we put her in a RUB for a couple of hours, first time for 12 days. I used John's misting idea as well. Hopefully she's come round and will eat more regularly now. Yesterday Bethan also shed for the first time since her really bad shed, this time wasn't so bad but she did retain the skin on the left side of her head. That was easily sorted, I just held some warm, damp kitchen roll against the side of her head for a minute then held the loose end of skin while she pulled it off. Job done, a well shed and shiney tiny snake.
With Bethan eating tonight I hope that means she has decided that food is a good thing and we aren't looking at another FTT.