Reptile & Amphibian Forums

What's a good guideline to go by as far as how big of a hide box your burm would need? I have a 3 X 8 cage with an 2 X 2 box. My burm is around 11 to 12 feet now. She doesn't spend as much time in it as she did a few years ago. Is she more comfortable and doesn't need it or is she out growing it? It seems that I have an adequate sized cage. If I make the box much bigger she won't have any room to stretch out otherwise. Thanks for any knowledge you can give me!

Your cage size is def large enough, two by two may be a little to small for her at that length and girth. I wouldn't put a larger one in there to be honest,since she doesn't use it as often as when she was younger I would think removing it and not putting in another would not effect her behavior. I have seen removing cage furniture halt some snakes feeding (ball pythons), I have never noted this with my retics or burms, I use hides for all my Boids when they are smaller and when they get "too" large I simply remove it from their enclosure and stick with a simple set up, newsprint and water bowl, my snakes are eating and have reproduced in this type of environment. I must note they do sometimes hide under the newspaper, so they still want to hide, just providing a hide large enough in a 6 to 8 foot enclosure becomes next to impossible for the reasons you stated, so the snake will hide even without a hide box, unless your substrate somehow prevents them from doing so.
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Frank Roberts
R&R Herpetological Frank Roberts & John Rodriguez

Roberts'Realm of Reptile Research

Our 11 ft. burm is in our living room. Our cage that we built for him is 4 ft. long, 2 ft. wide, and 7 ft. tall. It has 2 shelves, one about 3 ft. up and the other at about 5 1/2 ft. up. So he can use the hight and he does. His water is recessed in the bottom of the cage under the higher shelf. Holding up the outside edge of the lower shelf is a large log and i've tacked a bunch of ivy and other plants down from the shelf all the way around it. He very rarely hides, he's usually on the 2nd shelf and goes down to soak and goes under the lower shelf behind the ivy when he's about to shed. We haven't had any problems with him eating or being cranky.
we're building a new enclosure thats much much much larger in our garage and it will also have shelves and we'll probably do the same thing again with the ivy to give him a little privacy.
Beth
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The rescue site: www.freewebs.com/okreptilerescue