Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Got a phone call this afternoon from my brother in law asking me if I want some snakes.Of coarse he don't know what kind they are.He usually trys to give me some stinky old garter snakes.
Well he tells me they are 4' water snakes.I tell him I'm busy watching kids,and if he would bring them down to my house,I would look at them and if they are water snakes I would let them loose on my property.
When he gets here he gets a big box out of his trunk and in it are 3 nice easterns.One was wounded pretty bad(they were dug up from a shale bank with a backhoe)but the other two he caught by hand and are in good shape.
I released the wounded one out in my woodlot in hopes that it will make it.Of the other two,it looks like a 1.1 pair strictly by looking at the tail length.The one with the short tail(female) is pretty swollen and looks gravid to me.My question is:would the gravid females be noticably swollen right now?This would be about that time right?
Anyhow,I set them up in a 20 gallon long with news paper,a hide box,water bowl,heat pad and a clamp lamp with a 60 watt bulb in it.I'm going to hang onto them for awhile to see what happens.My black rats were copulating thursday night and I figure if I'm going to set up an incubator for those eggs,I might as well try to hatch out some easterns too.

Remember the hibernaculum I mentioned below that got bulldozed. Last spring my friend, Eddie, and I, found a large female at the hibernaculum site. As luck would have it, Eddie wanted to try his hand at incubating some eggs, so he took the female that we knew had been copulating with males there. She delivered the eggs around the end of June (yes, I think you can notice she is gravid). He hatched out all the babies and brought them back up north over Labor Day Weekend. We released them in the woods near the original site. I hope many of them dispersed and are now still alive. I doubt the mother survived the bulldozer.

PS: I've never seen babies at the hibernaculum. Hmmmm, I wonder if Easterns eat their own young?

TC

Just a clarification from below. I don't have a problem with you feeding redbellies to your milksnake, they eat them like crazy in the wild. Living in SE Wisconsin we don't have a lot of redbellies or any other kind of snakes around - urban sprawl and major habitat fragmentation. The harder they are to come by the more precious they get.

So where you at in Michigan? I'm from the Thumb originally and still manage to get to the UP quite a bit. I'm going to be in Marquette for work tomorrow - hoping to poke around for some fox snakes if I get a chance
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Tim

I live in Cheboygan County, about 30 miles south of the Bridge. The Western U.P. is pretty good for fox snakes in some places. I usually see them around Escanaba when I'm passing through (dor). If you could get down by the L. Michigan coast, that would be better than L. Superior, I think.

PS: Found my third milk snake of the season on my way home from work tonight. I stopped at my rattlesnake spot, but instead of a massasauga, there was a nice adult, female Eastern under the tin. Nothing fancy, same kinda dull color most have here.

Later,

TC

Nice area you live in. I've always been partial to the Huron side of the state.

I agree with your thoughts. I've found a lot of fox snakes in Dickinson and Iron Counties. Not as much in Marquette. The weather is quite a bit more harsh.
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Tim

yes it would be fairly easy to tell if a female is gravid. I have kept many gravid easterns till they lay eggs and release them and hatch the eggs they usually lay around mid june in upstate NY, well at least the ones I have kept, getting the babys toeat though may be a problem good luck with theese under appreciated snakes
wayne

After taking a closer look at both snakes,I think they are both males.The one that looked heavy yesterday regurged two un-identified rodents over night.It also is missing about 1 or 2 inches of tail,which made it look more like a female at first glance.On an interesting note:the rodents were not very well digested wich makes me think it had just eaten yesterday or the day before,and it was a pretty cool weekend here.In the 60 degree range,and rainy.As deep as the brother-in law says these snakes came from,It's no wander they are not seen above the surface that often,especially if there is a good food source of ground moles(thats my guess)down where they live.He still has more backhoe work to do at that spot,and I'm going to go over there and watch what he may dig up.Thanks to all that replied.
Mike Mitstifer