You're right John. It's extremely dead around here. Maybe the regulars are in brumation like their chucks. Give it a little while and hopefully they'll start to wake up. After all, even the chucks are apparently somewhat active now.

Today I went to a reptile show and one vendor had about 12 chucks. First I've seen this season. I haven't even seen any on the kingsnake classifieds yet. Needless to say, I couldn't resist picking up a couple of males, maybe to lessen the hurt of my recent loss.

Both males have great temperments, not flighty or aggressive and very inquisitive, the very quality that I found so endearing about chucks the first time I ever saw one in person. The larger male already ate out of my hand. He came right up to me to take the lone dandelion flower that I found in my yard today out of my fingers.

The smaller one I would describe as an immature male, especially judging by his size. He is quite a bit smaller than the other male. He has a solid black head and his back is speckled with orange that will hopefully fill in a little as he grows. Strange to me though (probably simply because I haven't seen enough chucks in person) is that his femoral pores seemed to be pretty well developed for his size (way more so that the other chucks his size and more than the adult females). He even had waxy secretions coming out of his pores. The larger male is an overall white coloration (even his head is mostly white) with only some orange and a little black speckled over his body. His overall white coloration makes me think I should call him Casper.

Although the vendor did not have any locality info on these chucks, the amount of variation I saw in this group reminds me of the group of 20 or so chucks from Box Canyon CA. I'm guessing these chucks are from some CA locale, but I wish I knew where. They definitely do not remind me of any of the Nevada chucks that I've seen much more frequently over the years.

Perry

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