Visitors!

So the yesterday I was to hang out and catch up with my best friend - they offered to pick me up from my house, so I asked them if they wanted to come and officially meet Ramón!

Nathan was a little apprehensive about Ramón and had no intention of holding him. Alois on the other hand was more than keen!

Ramón was very curious about the new smells. Possibly a little frightened. But it was good to see him behaving with new people. I hope that, in time, the continued handling will make for a much more chilled out snake (or at least, one that it much more tolerant of handling) when he gets older.

Although he still has a very annoying habit of flinging himself towards the floor. I don't think he quite has the weight or length to stabilise himself along a rounded surface (such as an arm) yet. Alois was a little worried when Ramón fell, but I assured her that snakes are made of hardier stuff than to die from a foot-high drop. It's not the first time he's fallen to the floor out of his own curiousity.

He seemed very cautious after the fall! After I picked him up he clung to my finger quite firmly and didn't seem to want to let go. Hopefully, he's learned a thing or two from his experience.

It took him a little while to settle back down. After I was sure he was calm again I popped him back into his viv, and he was no worse for the experience.

Delicate moments

Just some photos of us handling Ramón.

Home Sweet Home (Part 2)

So now that we had the vivarium built, it seemed to us that it was looking a little.. plain. It needed a little pizzazz. A little je ne sais quoi. 

Le boring.

We collaborated on the background - I found a nice jungley photo (the one in the background of this blog) and trimmed it to spec, which Johno had printed at his work. Took him about an hour (or less) to put it on, even going over the vents to cover them. It came out beautifully!

Ooooooooh!

The current hides, we realised, were going to be too small for Ramón when he reached adulthood, but looking around (in pet stores and online) it seemed as though there weren't really many cost-effective ones that we liked. So off we went to Kmart to see if we could find something a little more suitable. A turned-over pot would have done nicely, but it wouldn't really have fit with the aesthetic we wanted for the vivarium. We did, however, find a very ingenious cold-hide :3

NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA

The eye-holes were open when we bought it, so Johno popped the lenses out of an old pair of sunnies and hot-glued them in. It is now dubbed the Batcave. We also found a nice bamboo utensil-holder (made for holding ladles and other stuff) in the kitchen section which we thought could serve nicely as a larger hide for him. Unfortunately, it looked really out of place next to the rough branches and dark brown substrate. So I took to it with some paint and muddy water after we both had a go at it with saw, file and knife. 

We also cut off a part of it so that it would sit flat. 

In the picture it looks really obviously done, but..

It looks heaps good next to everything else!

His larger (he has two) water dish is just a granite feeding dish for reptiles. The substrate is Kritter's Crumble. He also has a verandah, which is basically a wooden placemat over the top of the heat cord, to stop him from coming into too much contact with the actual cord. 

The final result!

The thermometer to the right of the cage takes the temp for the cold side, as well as having a node just on the  basking spot on a knot in the leftmost branch. The heat cord is on a separate thermostat, so it keeps it well warm on the ground. It does tend to dry out quite a bit with the open front, so regular spritzing is a necessity (at least in winter) to keep the humidity above 60%.

Basking temperature node

Much easier to spritz directly through the grill. 

That was pretty much it. A few days later we put Ramón in - he was a bit wary at first but he'd fully settled in  48 hours later. 

We let him explore on his own, but it took him a while [i.e, FOREVER] to slither out.

And then of course he stayed in the toilet roll for a good half hour.

An Introduction

When we first considered getting a pet together a snake wasn't our first choice. We went through the positive and negatives of the usual suspects - dogs, cats, fish, rodents - and eventually we decided that a dog was ambitious, just not practical for our situation. It was too expensive, too much maintenance, too much mess. I'm sure our housemates wouldn't have appreciated the increase in animal hair around the house (I have two dogs at my parent's house, and regularly come back covered in hair).

So we cast our net wider, looking at more unconventional pets. It seemed that reptiles fit the bill a little closer - comparatively low-maintenance, relatively inexpensive and unlikely to cause a large amount of mess.

But which reptile? Dragons were awesome in that they would happily scamper about and potentially chill on your shoulder. He (Johno) wanted a turtle, but I argued that cleaning a tank was a little too much work (one of the reasons I stayed away from keeping fish) despite their undeniable cuteness. Skinks creeped me out a tiny bit.

Snakes, however! There's something elegant and rewarding in owning a snake. It feels like a piece of the wild, akin to patting a wolf or tiger. Dogs will play bite, cats will scratch at you to feed them - but there is no real alpha presence to a snake. You cannot lead it by posturing or demanding. You can only grow with it.

Into our home came our little slithering bundle of joy - an as-of-yet-unsexed Antaresia Maculosa. We had bantered back and forth about a name until I remembered a story about an artist who didn't have a name for the first three months of his life, and how he did pretty okay at bringing laughter to the world (or at least, to me). So he became our Ramón.

Spots and all.