Pi Reptiles

Only two and a half months in to the year, and it’s shaping up to be quite a ride.

This year was always supposed to be our first big year. We’ve been building up our 2007 females for this point. Just about all of our wild type girls are up to weight, and after having last year off, they are all well fed and rested for this year. Most of our morph females are at good weights too, except for the usual suspects (our 07 albino who’s still to this day under 400g), and the odd one or two who got to 900g and then stopped feeding.

Other than that, it’s shaping up to be a good year. Except for one small problem….

We always intended on breeding our female honey bee to our male cinnamon hypo. He was imported specially so that we could pair them together to breed cinna-honeys. This plan A was all going well. She was feeding as well as she always has, and hit the 2000g mark late last year, he was feeding on defrost finally and put some nice “pre-season” weight on. We paired them up like we had done with dozens of others and …. Nothing. No interest what so ever from the male. So, we decided to try him with some other females, our WC butterscotch ghost being the first, and again, no interest. Starting to think that he might be out for the season, we decided to put her to a different male, as our pastel clown is young, we went with our proven breeding clown male, and he’s done the business quite nicely, locking her many times, and we’ve now been able to ultrasound 5-6 good follicles inside her, so all is well with her. The male was given one last try with a big proven female ghost (who also had last year off), and he locked her within the hour! He’d finally found his mojo, and he’s since gone on to lock a female cinnamon too, but still unwilling to pair with the honey bee.

Such as is the way with some animals, they just don’t seem to get along. But that’s what keeps this all such good fun, and so interesting, the uncontrollable variables. We can feed them, clean them, pet them, love them, some times even hate them, but we can’t bend them to our will. It’s a nice balance keeping these snakes, they bring us such pleasure, and in return we bring them a secure and comfortable environment.

Pi have also expanded a little over the last few months with several animals not shown on the website. We’ve a nice small group of reticulated python morphs including becoming only the third owners of an albino golden child, along with a normal golden child female, and a few locality animals. We’ve also acquired the one and only Burmball. A hybrid between a royal python and a burmese python, who has, to say the least, caused a major stir in the reptile world. Finally, our latest additions outside of the ball python world is a lovely pair of angolan pythons, who will be coming home with us later this week. A dream come true species for me personally.

- Rain