So, what happens when a Boa ingests some Aspen bedding?

In about 2003 or 2004 I was feed my Boas in an evening. One of those Boas was a large female Pastel that was born in my original "Lucy" litter in 1989. This is the litter where the original "East Bay Vivarium Red Group" animals came from. A 14 or 15 year old Boa. She has cataracts mind you. She is in an upper cage and as I am making my way down the isle, she strikes out, nails the door at a steep angle, proceeds down into the Aspen and gets a mouth full, and I do mean a mouth FULL of Aspen. Her mouth is agape as the Aspen is loaded to her gills and part way into her throat! Bummer! It's late and I WAS almost done.

So I open the door, grab her behind the head so I can start picking out the Aspen with a hemostat. She will have none of it! Imagine how spastic she is now with a mouth FULL of Aspen and me holding her right behind the head trying to restrain her. She goes ballistic! Thrashing and whipping her tail around puckering out her cloaca. It was ugly. “OK. That's what you want, that's what you get!”, I told her. Ungrateful animal just had no idea I was trying to help her. I put her back in the cage, with a great deal of difficulty and closed the door. “I'll take care of you in the morning…”

I was in fear for her life. She was so stressed, and I really had no real idea how exactly to tackle that. It’s one of those things you have to do. It doesn’t matter if you have done it before or not. It doesn’t matter if you know exactly how to do it or not. You just do it.

Sort of like one time I had a female Boa that was trying to give birth. She was contracting and wringing and I could see this one immense slug come part way out and then retreat back into the female. I watched this for about ten minutes when I realized I had to do something. I had never done it before. I didn’t know the best way to do it. I didn’t have any rubber gloves handy, but I took care of what needed to be done. I opening the cage door, took hold of the female’s ample tail just below the vent, inserted my right forefinger along side that slug into the cloaca, hooked my finger toward the slug and pulled that sucker out! It was or looked like several older slugs all stuck together. She had stopped long enough to try to figure out what on Earth I was doing back there. Once I got that thing out I released the tail and moved back. She commenced doing her duty and we had many more happy babies born in short order. Never did it. Didn’t know how to do it, but I did it. No, there isn’t any video and nobody else even saw me do it. Just me, my Boa in the dark with a snake light wrapped around my neck so I could see what I was doing. Git er’ done I guess is what they call that.

So I hadn’t had a Boa shovel Aspen before, at least not that I had seen. I'd never had that happen before, but she was so crazed I had no shot at doing anything at that time. I would tackle her in the morning.

The next morning, I go down to start the task of hopefully cleaning up that mess with her, hopefully settled down a bit. I turn on the lights, head down the hall to her isle, hang a left and make my way to her cage. As I look in the cage at that last stack on the left, top cage, she is coiled up with her head on top looking at me just as pretty as can be as if to say, "What"? "What are you looking at"? There she was, mouth completely closed. Not so much as one little piece sticking out a corner of her mouth. I checked. Clean as a whistle and she had completely calmed down. So, what happened? I don't know. Maybe the Aspen fairies showed up to help her out and cleaned out her mouth in the middle of the night. Maybe one of the miracles of evolution is that when people aren’t looking, that Boas actually have hands and she picked out what she could and flossed the rest. Maybe. Or maybe, God who created her and all of the wonders of nature, has endowed snakes with the ability to somehow take care of the occasional foreign object that makes it into their mouths when they eat. Somehow. How exactly I don’t know but it worked out just fine. She produced two more great litters from me in years after that. I did loose her a couple years ago when she was nearly eighteen years of age and the Mother of I don’t know how may babies over the years. She was a baby when she didn’t have Aspen in her mouth.

Her is one of her babies from her last litter. A Lucy Pastel het Albino Female. Pattern wise and color wise, the only one anything like this one in the litter. Remarkable:


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Jeff Ronne Sr
The Boaphile
Director USARK

Originator of Boaphile Plastics
The Boaphile Boa Site
The Boaphile Photo Gallery Link

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