My male has decided to join the living, and now kills every lizard I put in his cage. He's opaque now, but I'll begin working him towards defrosted rodents soon. He has just barely begun to grow--hardly noticable until you look at his sister.
His sister is starting to earn the sort of nicknames we don't put on a public forum. She fed voluntarily on a lizard, but then reconsidered her move towards the light, and, after two weeks of screaming and running from lizards, got a forced pinky and sent to bed with no TV.
When I got into knoblocki kings, I bought a male that was presented as a problem feeder, and a female that was presented as feeding vountarily. The male ate a scented fuzzy the day I got him, and the female tried my patience so hard, I almost popped a vein trying to control my vexation. In the end, she started eating only after I gave her a small rock pile at one end of her cage, and heated the rocks to boot. Her early meals were baby Urosaurus, a locally abundant lizard. In Arizona, we are allowed to collect small lizards for use as feeders, and Urosaurus really take it in the shorts. Good thing they are so fertile.
Anyway, that female knob is now the mother of my entire knob dynasty. She's ten years old, and eats defrosted jumbo mice like a python. This year she laid 13 eggs, all of which hatched into healthy babies. For some reason, most of her babies eat right away.
I've been through this with many snakes, and I still have hope that one day, the female Eastern Coachwhip will be a model citizen of my collection. Until then, I'll keep the thesaurus handy to try and preserve some variety in the language I use in private to refer to her.
