nakes! I previously owned two snakes, but had to give away the red-tailed boa when I moved north to live with Malaya in July of 2003.  You can see pictures of both types below.

Neither snake has a name since come on, who are you fooling?  It's a reptile; it's never going to learn a damn thing.  The snakes look sufficiently different that I never confuse one for the other, so just calling them by their breed is sufficient for my identification needs.

The two snakes are:

• A Ball Python that I've owned since about 1993.  He/she/it is full grown and about 4.5" long, and uncommonly-nimble in the trees, for a fat and lazy ground snake.
• A Columbian Red-Tailed Boa Constrictor that I've owned since about 1995. She was exactly 4 feet long at the time of purchase, and is 8-9 feet long as April 2003 and still growing. She would eat a lot more than I feed her if given the option. (The python was given away pre-move in July 2003, so obviously there won't be any more photos of her added.)

The snakes spend 99% of their time asleep in their aquariums, on the heat source.  Yet they don't photograph well inside the tanks, due to the glare on the glass, and the fact that they aren't doing anything worth getting a photo of factors in as well.

• August 1st and 16th, 2002.
• October 3, 2002.
• November 16, 2002.
• January 31, 2003.

Much more snake info on the main pets page.

• Photos on this page show small, dead, furry things being consumed by large reptiles. Stop here if that sort of thing is likely to distress you.
• Most recent additions are on top. Check the Interspecies page for more recent (non-lethal) snake/feline interactions.

Looooooong stretch. She's never actually done this on her own, I just got her one time when her head was way down and lifted her over to the pull up bar. And quickly had to remove her from it when she was crawling up the chain and getting all snarled.
--November 14, 2002

I love this pic.  It's like, "the last thing a capybara sees." This is how the big snake looks more of the time, when she's up on the overhead climbing thing.  Just sprawled all around it everywhere.
--November 14, 2002

Three shot sequence of the Ball Python trying to choke itself to death on my new pull up bar.  Notice the thin neck through the hook opening in shot 1.  Snakes are very adept at sticking their skinny necks into small openings, and then trying to continue forwards, having no idea at all that they'll never fit.  If they get wedged it's really hard to get them to back up too, so you need to keep an eye on them.  The big Boa tries this between the bathtub faucets every time I wash her off.
--November 14, 2002

A better shot of the Ball Python in action.  This is about as big a rat as he's ever eaten, and it doesn't look like it would even be possible, does it?  Reminds me of my first wife.
--October 1, 2002

Nice close up of the boa.  She's really quite pretty and iridescent, especially if you look soon after she's shed.  They get gradually duller looking over the couple of months until the next shed, and are then born anew. At least the boa sheds perfectly, ever time, like unrolling a giant condom.  The Ball Python does like a lizard half the time, with it coming off cleanly in some places, but remaining patch elsewhere.

This photo is actually rotated 90º, and the head is pointing down.  Click the image to see the original and larger shot.  I rotated it here to better fit the photo page format.
--August 31, 2002

Good look at the size of the Boa, as I hold her up for display.  She's heavy, not not tremendously so.  She could probably double in weight if I let her eat as much as she wanted to, but most snakes in captivity are grossly overfed and overweight, and I don't want mine to join the club.

Another shot from the same sequence.  I sort of like this one, with the powerful creature wrapped around me.  The tail around the arm and contoured over my shoulder is a nice touch.
--July 31, 2002

The other problem with photos inside of the aquarium is that my stupid auto-focus digicam doesn't know what to focus on.  The top lid or edge seems to be the most popular choice, which then makes the snake blurry, a foot out of the focal depth.

Oh, and here's the Ball Python biting and constricting the thawed rodent. This snake has a very narrow neck, relatively to its body, so the stretching required to swallow something that doesn't even put a lump in its belly is surprising.
--June 29, 2002

The smaller Ball Python working on swallowing the prey pictured above.  The cord to the right is from his heating pad, which died and has since been replaced with an undertank heater that it seems to prefer.  I certainly do, since he invariably peed/crapped on the heating pad, which added to the clean up.
--June 29, 2002

Not the loveliest of photos, is it?  I usually feed this snake by holding the (dead) rat by the tail and letting it swing back and forth a bit.  The snake always pops right up and comes over, since she's always hungry. The fact that the prey is dead doesn't seem to bother her, and she gives them a minute of perfunctory constriction before swallowing it down. She gets a full grown rat about every 4 weeks. Not a real varied diet, no.

This photo and the ones above it were taken for a friend who kept badgering me for shots of the snakes eating.  If you don't like it, blame him.
--June 29, 2002

The first snake picture I ever took, and no, it didn't get me off to a very good start. Here's why I seldom try to photograph them in their tanks.  Glare (which is why this is cropped down so much), bad angles, the snake is just lying there, the little water trickles on the side of the tank that are invisible to the naked eye look terrible in the flash photo, etc.

This is the big snake, perhaps needless to say.  They look amazingly-compressed when they are all curled up.  This snake is nearly 9 feet long and thicker than a child's leg in the body, but I imagine you could put the whole thing into a lobster pot pretty easily. Now there's a lovely image to pop into your head when next you go crawling under the stove for the big pots.
--June 27, 2002

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.