Thanks Bob,.. I'm glad you can appreciate that beautiful example. Yes, he was an extremely clean, vivid, classic example for sure. I had him for many years after I first captured him in my back yard in the outskirts of town in a very wooded area one April night. He was a very thin 40 incher that only weighed 97 grams at the time. It was obvious to me that he had a very tough existence out in the wild for some reason.



It wasn't long afterwards when I started to feed him that I immediately noticed why he was thin. He seemed to have a very clumsy strike response for some reason, and was likely what caused him to miss out on quite a few meals that he would have probably otherwise been able to dispatch. He was probably only surviving mostly on the abundant anoles that were in my area.



He ate rodents very well in my care since he didn't have to worry about catching the F/T rodents I offered..LOL!, so he grew like crazy and put on very good weight as well. He did great for many years afterwards too, and last weighed somewhere in the 750-800 gram range and was extremely healthy looking. I later captured a decent 5 foot locality female from the same area approx. 8 miles away inside a lady friend's house of my moms, and was then going to breed them that following spring. This female acclimated to captivity fabulously and snatched big F/T breeder mice out of my tongs like popcorn..LOL!



Not long after all this, the nice male's health went downhill like a rock for some un-known reason, and soon after the poor guy was found dead in his cage. I was pretty bummed by it, because I grew a bit attached to him over all those years and it was so nice to see how big and healthy he looked after his tough time out in the wild.



Anyway, after he died, with all the other animals and projects going, I really didn't see the need to hold onto the female forever trying to locate another nice locality-specific mate for her, so I let her go in the same area I captured her.



Anyway, thanks for the nice comments about him Bob. Certainly no big rarity, but he was certainly a fine Yellow Rat representative.



Oh!, and thanks Rainer for the great timing you used for your comments. Hard to figure that it was really that necessary to step in the very next post to add the hybrid issue.



Yeah......it certainly IS called "agenda", isn't it?









~Doug
-----
"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

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