After a few weeks of forcing pinks, both Eastern hatchlings ate voluntarily last weekend. While much of America is scraping ice off their windshields, I was out noosing Utas (Side-Blotched Lizards) in warm sunshine. I'll pay for my smugness after May, when temps reach 115--for months. Anything metal that's outdoors needs to be wrapped in something to prevent your flesh from bursting into flames if you touch it.
Anyway, both Easterns ate one nice meaty Uta each. Utas are meaty little things, too. Hopefully, the 'whips are beginning a new era of feeding. I have enough Utas for a few weeks, by which time the Banded Geckos should be out--they are easier to harvest. Keep those candles lit for me that the Easterns will start on small mice by summer. Maybe even defrosted by fall (yah, and maybe I'll wake up one morning as Brad Pitt....).
The Westerns are business as usual. The female and one of the males accept live fuzzies, the other male takes live lizards, and also partook of an Uta. That lizard-eating male has a flap of loose skin along the top of his neck--at first, I feared it was a hunger fold, but it remains even though he is feeding well, and nicely fleshed elsewhere. A wattle. My snake has a wattle on his neck. I may have to intervene come prom time, and pressure someone I know to arrange to have their daughter (coachwhip) go to the prom with him if that wattle doesn't do something by his teen years.
