I recently acquired a beautiful (and devious) pueblan milksnake, about 11" long and as big around as a pencil. just as described in the books they are nervous and wiggly creatures, and fast too. I wanted to give it some time to settle in b4 handling it so i set up a nice tank with lots of hides, water and deep aspen shavings for burrowing. of course temp and humidity were monitored diligently via digital probes in hot and cool sides of the tank. sometimes he would peek out at me from under the aspen as if to say hello. well, one day i noticed i hadn't seen him for a while, but i still didn't want to disturb him so i kinda looked around the tank and figured he was deep in the aspen snoozing. that morning at 4 am wile getting ready for work i started to worry. i opened the lid and began to search, long story short, no snake!!. remembering what i had read i set up a bit of a trap in the room a heat lamp, a hide, a tiny bit of mouse, and some water. opened up the windows and sealed the room. in the middle of doing this however my wife walked in.... Now i don't care how good a liar you are, there is nothing you can say to cover this up. i was busted. My wife loves the Ball Python, the milksnake on the other hand she is not too fond of. suddenly the situation went from DEFCON 3 to DEFCON 1, MUST FUND SNAKE NOW. so, more tearing apart of my guy room ensued while my lovely wife began mixing concrete outside my door. After an hour or so with no luck, (BTW calling your boss and trying to explain that you are gonna be late because a snake escaped is a very unpleasant experience in and of itself), I sat down with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and looked very carefully at the tank and the surrounding area. and tried to think like a snake. the tank rests on a rubbermaid shelf made of plastic shelves four tubes, another shelf 4 tubes etc. well there is really no way down and nothing a snake would be interested in on the shelf except the nice dark holes of the shelf tubes, sure enough when i shined my flashlight down the tube there was snakie curled up at the bottom of a four foot tube!!! Now i'm not a religious person, but i thanked whatever deity inspired the design of those shelves as i am not now resembling the victim in the"The Cask of Amontillado" ..... In pace requiescat.
Anyway even after being trapped in a dark hole for god know how long snakey still did not want to come out and it took a good 15 min to get him out and back into his cage. At this point our best guess is that he climbed the 2 mm digital probe wire and found a hole big enough to get out through. He had to have been gone at least 12 hours because the previous night i put weatherstripping all around the top lid as it seemed a bit loose to me. Well snakey has lost his aspen privileges, and now has a nice bit of carpet to move around on. plus all hides are visible, so snakey can be seen at all times. except for last night.......
Yes he did it again. 12" of sheer glass. I was napping yesterday afternoon when i awoke with the vague feeling that something was wrong. I went over to the milk snakes tank and you guessed it, no snake. nothing higher that 3" in the tank, no wires just glass. I have no idea how he did it, unless i somehow got ahold of some kind of levitation morph. I go to open the tank lid and THUNK, snakey drops, so I either caught him b4 he found a hole, or i sealed the lid well enough that he just couldn't get out. ever since then he has been in the corner giving me the evil eye for ruining his plans to take over the world.
Mike
