Reptile & Amphibian Forums

i walked up to the tank that my cal king lives in , to look for
feces , clean water ect.
i removed the towel from the top draped over the front for privacy , i look the cage over everything is fine , i noticed
that her eyes are fogged over(post shed) she is really maaad .
so reach for the towel to drap back over the front , and she
strikes at my arm in front of the glass reaching for the towel
and hits her face on the glass. i was like oh!!! i then watched her kind of, i'm not sure how to explain it, but it was like
if someone hit you in the face you would open your jaw, kind of
move it around like feeling the pain?.....she did that, the inside
of her mouth was clean(no blood)
she stuck her tongue out a few times like "man that sucked"
kind of look.....
what do you think?
could she be injured from this?
thanks,
I feel awful
dallas

She should be fine. I once had a Monacled Cobra that would start hitting the glass like that the moment you walked into the snake room and wouldn't stop until he couldn't see you anymore. He would have venom just running down the glass on the front of the cage. I finally had to start turning his cage around so that the glass was facing the wall so he couldn't see me every time I went in to work in that room because I was afraid he would injure himself. He would still get in 10 or 12 good strikes before I got the cage turned around. I tried covering the front of the cage with a towel, but for some reason that just didn't fool him. He still knew I was out there and you would hear the huffing and puffing and "THUMP!", "THUMP". It was unnerving to say the least. But if I turned the cage around he would stop it. I had that one for 3 or 4 years and he never really injured himself. I think he was psycho anyway, though. There was a number of times that he would have to stop for a second or two to re-joint his jaws. The really odd thing about that snake was that if you took him out of the cage, he was fine. He would calm right down and would seldom even hood outside the cage. As a matter of fact, that's how I got him. He was used for school programs by a friend of mine, but wouldn't hood (a non-hooding Cobra just isn't an impressive animal for snake shows). So, he gave him to me to try to get him to breed with my females. However, if he was in his cage, he was nuts. He would absolutely bite you if you weren't careful going into his cage to clean or whatever.

Thanks oldherper ,that does sound unnerving but at the same time humorous?, so it was
Just loony?
right after she did it I watched her for a minute, covered the
cage so she could settle down- and an hour later she was cool
again? face was ok -nothing that I could see was wrong -
I’ve never had a boa or python be that moody.
does it just boil down to a size thing? like "my dad is bigger
than yours" napoleon type insecurity?
do they grow out of it as they get larger & older?
thanks bro,
Dallas

In general snakes settle down as they gain size... But sometimes they get worse! lol
-----
International Snakes Meetup
International Herpetology Meetup

I dunno, Dallas...the ones I've seen that were like that never seemed to get tired of it.

You'd think they'd get one hell of a headache, but I guess not. To me it's sort of like a Woodpecker. I can never understand how they can do that all day, day in and day out. When I used to hang out down in Appalachicola, there was a species of woodpecker down there called a Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus). I've seen them other places too, but they seemed to be fairly numerous there (which was amazing in itself considering what they do). Anyway, this thing is about the size of a Cockatoo (well, maybe a little smaller)and had a call that sounded remarkably like a deranged chicken. It would fly full speed and slam into the side of a tree and then start just hammering it's head into the tree. It sounded like an M-60 machine gun. I always wondered why they didn't end up with a concussion. I guess that explains why their head feathers are red....so the blood running out of their ears doesn't show so much.

Woodpeckers have a special head structure to accomodate all that hammering... sort of a shock absorber. I guess that's fairly obvious.
I figured it doesn't hurt snakes because the elastic tissue in their jaws might sort of absorb the impact. I could be wrong, maybe it does hurt them but some of them never quite get the concept.