Mister Underhill (Or Mister Undermat, as it were)

Ramón is a terrestrial snake. Though he does seem to appreciate his vivarium branches, more often than not he'll be on the ground if he doesn't want to be disturbed. Usually right in the back corner behind the larger bamboo hide (not in it, squeezed in behind  it).

Popping out from behind aforementioned hide

So it doesn't particularly worry me if I can't see him if I pop over to check on him. Right now he'll be either behind the bamboo hide, or in his other rock one (they're both on the warm side).

Sliding in

Then there were 3 consecutive days where he was just.. not around. Two days I could understand, but three started to worry me. I grabbed the torch and had a peep into his hides, expecting him to be hiding in his rock.. but all I could see was substrate.

I checked behind the bamboo hide. No, not there either. Maybe he's on the cool end. Not in the Batcave. Not under the bridge. My heart starts fluttering.

I'm trying to stay calm. There's no way he could have gotten out. He must just be hiding under the substrate somewhere. I poke around, hoping to disturb him wherever he may be.

Still nothing. I'm freaking out. How the hell did he get out? Where would he be now? Maybe he crawled into the spare substrate under the viv? I carefully start pulling out substrate from the vivarium, though my heart is starting to break a little.

Eventually I've taken all the substrate out and he's not there. I'm devastated. I'm trying to remember the last time I saw him. And then I look at the wooden mat that we taped down over the heat cord and I think, "He used to have this habit of crawling under paper towel in his click clack [plastic enclosure we got him in]... oh wait on, no fucking way."

This is how we had initally proposed to stop Ramón from getting under the mat in the first place:

Lots of masking tape.

I ripped up the tape - lo and behold, there he was, snuggled right up to the heat cord. He had circumvented the tape by digging through the substrate that we had tightly packed around the base of the leftmost tree branch ["He won't get through that."]. Little bastard.

Needless to say I was extremely relieved. It took a little coaxing to get him out from under there - I put him back into his old click clack and  took the opportunity to clean down the vivarium. I also taped the mat down again - this time, including around the branch.

Ain't no snake getting under this time.

I wasn't going to take any chances.

Since my retaping he hasn't disappeared again. If, by some power, he ends up under there again - and dies from dehydration or whatever - I'm probably going to be really upset, but frankly, the Darwin files deserve that one.

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.

Home Sweet Home (Part 1)

Ramón's vivarium was a point of long discussion between the two of us. Even though we spent most of a week discussing it, we still ended up spending a good 4 hours in Bunnings weighing up our options. Luckily, Johno's parents gave us a simple solution.

They had recently reorganised their laundry room, which freed up an old MDF shelving unit that Johno had made for them years before. Turned on its side, it was perfect. the wood provided excellent insulation and heat/moisture resistance. We removed one of the shelves and used the other to cordon off an area for accessories storage. His parents also provided us with a large branch that was recently cut from a tree in their garden. It took us two lazy weekend afternoon session to put the vivarium together.

We cut the branch in two to make it look a little more interesting

Johno did most of the work really, cutting holes for the vents and generally doing all those handy man things that he does. I mostly helped stabilise it while he was doing those things. 

Clearly, I had the harder job.

The rest wasn't too hard to install. Since our heat lamp was caged (the girl at the store assured us that it would be safe for Ramón to be direct contact with it) we decided to seal the top with acrylic and make the front a grill to provide ventilation - mostly for the summer months when it gets quite warm. 

Storage shelf, acrylic top and grill front

Right now it's winter, so we make sure to cover the front with a towel so the vivarium stays nicely at 30°-32°C (hot end) and 18°-24°C (cool end) even when it drops below 10° at night.

Heat lamp mounted to an offcut

 The idea was to at the heat lamp on an angle at the crux of the leftmost branch so he had a nice basking spot, but also heat up the upper parts of the rightmost branch so that it would help spread and retain heat throughout the vivarium. 

Basking spot

We also bought some garden downlights (the kind you attach to fences and things) to provide some cool night lighting.

Down lights

Looks pretty good on, too.

Pimpinnnn'!

Johno also had the bright idea of sealing the top with draft stopper tape!

You can also see the internal hinges we bought. 

After all that it was simply a matter of putting all the other accessories on, like handles and locks. 

I was really more of an.. "Artistic Director".

Decorating the vivarium was a different sort of joy all in itself! To be continued!

Orientation Week

The first week after we brought him home was a tad anxious for the both of us (moreso for me, really). As expected, he was fairly cranky. It made cleaning a bit difficult, I will admit.

This is one of the calmer shots.

But after a while he'd settled in and was happy to take in the sights and smells of his new home.

Ramón at 400mm (or thereabouts)

Thankfully he fed pretty much the night after he'd come home - the breeder had informed us that he hadn't eaten for 10 days when we picked him up. He was noticably less cranky the day after.

Food baby!

 Two days after his feed we deemed him settled enough to start handling. It was nerve-wracking, picking him up with my own hands for the first time! He's quite scared a lot of the time - understandably so - but if you're gentle and patient he shows a lot of curiousity.

Although there was this one time he got a little spooked and flung himself out of Johno's hand back into his box, landing face first into the water dish. Silly snake.

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.