Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello,

I've seen lots of posts on the various forums talking about nesting materials etc for snakes. I was digging through the old posts to try and find the original series of posts by FR (and others) that described the process of nesting in kingsnakes (and other snakes too) but I couldn't find it. I know it's there but for some reason I'm having difficulty finding it. So I thought I would bring it back up again since egg laying season is upon us and I'm thinking about trying the nesting approach this year with my colubrids.

If you don't mind FR, can you post the details of your nesting box/materials again in this thread so we have everything in one place. Everyone else can chip in too, but I know FR has a few posts about it for sure!

Thank you in advance.

Cheers,

Kyle
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Kyle R. Mara

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I'm using this......moistened sphagnum moss and a 12"x12" tile on top.I don't leave the hide box in with her. She doesn't use it.

I've almost always used a plastic shoe box with a hole cut in both the lid and one side of the container. The holes are about twice the diameter of snake.

I've used sphagnum, vermiculite, combo of sphag/verm, and loose soil/sand mix. I think plain sphagnum is my favorite... the vermiculite kinda clumps together and makes good nests and seems to hold moisture better than anything, but it's messy, flakes, sticks to snakes etc... lots of cons. Sphagnum seems to be what the snakes prefer... most of my snakes just live in the moss as soon as its available to them.

I put the box in their cage as soon as they are obviously gravid and plump looking... usually well before the "pre-lay shed" so the females have plenty of time to find a suitable nesting location and get comfortable with it. If you wait until the last minuet to put the box in, the snakes dont think "hey that box is for my eggs, i'll put them there" right away and might hold the eggs longer than necessary or put them elsewhere in the cage.

None of my snakes recognize a lay box (Florida kings) as a place to lay.. So they used to always lay underneath the box.

Then I started using a sand and sphagnum mixture and just dumping that into the cage and covered it with a large heavy tile or thick glass. I piyt a water dish on top of that.

That is what I do with all my gravid snakes now and they lay a couple days after shed ..a sign that a snake is not accepting a "lay box" is they tend to wait 10 days after shed when in fact that is not what they are supposed to do.

They want to nest before laying and to do that they need a suitable nesting area.

Also never remove a water dish from a gravid females cage.. That is pure torture from them.. They need water prior to laying more than ever. I guess this practice of removing water dishes before laying started with people who use lay boxes as the snakes would get so desperate they would lay in a dish or just dump their eggs all over the cage.

I've used a soil/spagmun mix and fill the whole cage and put a clay plate on top and it has decreased down to about 5-9 days, vs. about 7-13 days with a box.

Sand/spagnum might be better. What kind of sand do you use and where do you buy it, ie garden supply, hardware supply, etc.?
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www.hcu-tx.org/

I just buy play sand from the local nusery.

Thanks, I will give that a try.
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www.hcu-tx.org/

If you can get the coco husk, I think coco husk is better with the sand.

I have these huge bins and I mix my laying material with all sorts of things in them and then scoop what I need out for the nesting (egg laying) . So I try to get creative with the mix with a little bit of everything in them. I do this because I have so many clutches and it becomes like a factory batch of cookie dough with a million small ingredients.

For instance yesterday I had a litte perlite left over from last year and I threw that in as well..but it ends up being a small amount.

experimentation is the fun part..to see what works best

My method is very similar, last year the nesting boxes in the enclosures were a complete failure for me, the snakes laid the eggs but never in a timely manner. By like the 4th clutch I just took the female out of her enclosure and put her in a 20 quart tall rubbermaid with about 4-5 inches of moistened peat moss and spag moss and a piece of tile with a water bowl on top of the tile. With mexican milks cal kings and honduran milks this method has worked very good for me with all eggs laid being good and they all laid within 3 days of being in this new form of a nesting box, which I put them in the day they shed.
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Congrats and good work!

Also the full cage of nesting material can be reused if one has a larger collection of snakes. This is not a time to get cheap anyway by just using a small shoebox of nesting material. What is a few cents more. ~LOL!

Great post guys. Thank you, Mike and Rainer. Your info provided here has given me some new ideas for nesting methods this season.

reako45

Hi Kyle, I am finally back, hahahahahahaha. I will attempt to answer your questions shortly, tonight or tomorrow mourning. I still do not have my pics on this new computer.
In the meantime think about this. As with anything there are degrees or good, or bad nesting. As in, there are many many ways to skin this cat, How you do it depends on you and your setup and willingness to work.
My best results occurred in making nesting boxes(nesting cages) that are much larger then the normal cages the snakes are in.

There appears to be some method of thinking that drives keepers to think a nest box must fit inside a cage. The problem is, most cages are too small for that to occur.
The key to this is, there are easily definable results that you can gauge nesting results. Much more then, eggs hatched. While eggs hatching is a base great result, once that occurs, then there are many more layers of success that can be measured. These layers are based on the effect nesting has on the female.
Great nesting, has little to no negative effect on the females. In fact within a few hours, you cannot tell the female laid. Little to no weight loss, etc.
Lastly, nesting is a learned behavior with both the snakes an keepers. here its about the snakes. With kings, if they nest successfully, they will attempt to nest in the exact same place, clutch after clutch and year after year. So please think about this, while I locate my pics and post them. I will post them at the top in a new thread. Thanks for being patient.