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here is one of my het melanistic thayeri from 2014.

here is the het melanistic with a sibling melanistic. sorry its a bit blurry

Nice, This year, I acquired 1.2 black thayeri. The male is an adult, the two females are last years. They are doing well.
I was lucky enough to catch the first black thayeri and produce them. That was a long time ago.

I was happy to see there are some still around.
Do you have pics of your adults?

Hi Frank.. here is a pic of the parents. the black one is the female. the male is her son. my original pair was the black female bred to a male acquired from vivid reptiles.

a story then a question.
When I found the first black thayeri, a late friend and I were in the field, he was in front of me and came up to a really nice looking area. I looked down and found a female exactly like the one you posted here. It was a neonate. My friend came over to look at it, then went in a different direction. I went to where he was when I found the little female. Again I looked down a saw a coil of a black snake sticking out from under a rock. So I grabbed it, the snake was in shed, and I actually had no idea what it was. I had it by a coil and asked my friend come over and lift the rock off. I didn't want to pull it out and hurt it. He asked what it was, I said, heck if I know. Its some kind of kingsnake I think. In the area, there are L.g.splendida, which possibly could be black, there are black racers not too far away. So he came and lifted the rock off the snake and I looked at it and tossed in out in the open. I then said, its not a racer. hahahahahahahahahahaha He said, what do you think it is? I responded with, it smells like a montane king, but who knows. I said it has a awful wide head for a getula. It did indeed turn out to be a case of recessive melanism.
My question, has anyone produced a snow thayeri yet?

I don't have the answer the the snow thayri question.

But I did want to come on here and say I love hearing (reading) stories of how some of the different snakes (and all herps in general) were found and brought into captivity and breeding.

thanks for the story Frank. i was just about to ask you to tell us about finding the first black thayeri

There is more, It was Bill Garska that found the area by accidentally road cruising two(a pair) one cold rainy night. If I remember correctly, he had given up on road hunting and was helping out a couple of stranded girls get back to town, when he found them. He wrote a paper on montane kings and I was his field guy. We inspected all the preserved kings and their localities.
Bill was an odd person and we got along well. One of the first Thayeri he found was a wonderful lite phase leonis type, Almost like a speckled alterna. He did not like that snake, so he traded it to me for the ugliest Blairs I had ever seen, a female rearly all black.
Bill was also the one who brought the albino Q kings into captivity. The first one of those was found in a lizard trap by a Herp student. They wrote a short note on how it was the missing link between Mexicana and milk snakes. Bill and Erine Wagner went down and found three Q kings. He bred them and gave some offspring to a herp student(friend) of his. That person hatched out some albinos, he then offered them back to Bill. But Bill didn't like albinos and said no, I don't want them. Right after They found #2,3,and 4 Q kings, Bill drew me a map as to where they were found, and I went there. The map included where to find the best carnitas in all of Mexico. hahahahahahahahahaha Anyway I went to the known site and it was destroyed. We had checked into a hotel, but then checked right back out. While heading out saw a nice area to investigate and my friend said, naw, lets go to find thayeri. Oddly I made a U turn and went down a dirt road, parked and we found 3 in ten minutes. We went back to town and got our hotel room back. We found 27 in the next day. Which was sad, my permit was for six, but most were large adults and I wanted neonates. So I kept a pair, we then went to N.L. and I found the Black Thayeri, and a few normal. So we went back to Q. to release the Adult Q kings. This time, there was all sizes and phases.

There were milksnake types and greeri(alterna, wide grey, narrow red types) But sadly, it was milksnake types that was unusual to captivity at the time. So I released the adults and kept a trio of milksnake phase neonates. My friend kept a pair of neonates. Ours did not produce albinos, even thought we did find one at the original site. And yes, those were fun times.
I have no idea why the greeri type ones never surfaced. Another conflict was, Bill published that Q kings only got 2 feet. That's what he found. We found many over 40 inches, up to 44 inches I believe. Again, we knew nothing, it was all new.
I do have other thayeri stories that interesting to captivity.

i would love to hear more stories. in what year did you find the black thayeri?

Actually I had to ask my wife, I think it was 1976 or 77. In that ballpark. I do have it written down on some slides, but that would mean I would have to go in the attic and find them.

np

Great stories Frank. A remember a night in Texas road cruising. It was got so cold we had the heater on and we were going back to the hotel. We stopped be cause we saw another hunter. When we got out to talk there was actually dew on the ground. In my experience it's rare to see it reach the dewpoint at that time of year. The other hunter had just caught a grayband and seen another one that got away into a crack.
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