house snakes info needed

Actually, I have another question about house snakes... is there a difference in care and the delicacy of the different kinds of house snakes? (i.e. Namibian, Striped, Brown, Aurora, etc.) I keep reading that house snakes are supposed to be voracious feeders when both of my striped house snakes tend to be finicky at times. In fact, my female has gone on a month-long fast all of a sudden and none of my little tricks to try to get her to eat have been working... Help?

My female gets kinda jumpy at times and won't eat. The thing that works best fo me is to feed her in some sort of hide. So far, that has not failed to work.

As far as the different sub-species of the house snake in our experience there is a huge difference in the keeping of the them. All of the house snakes except the Brown House Snake tend to be a little touchy, particularly the striped, nambian and aurora. All of those are some of my favorites as far as the normal colored animals. I keep all three but have stopped breeding them for sale to the general public, because of this tendency. They are hard starters, usually requiring pinky parts etc. On the other hand the "Brown House Snake" and all it's color morphs including the albino take newborn unscented pinks with very little hesitation. So we continue to bred and sell all of them.

As far as temps are concerned I agree with the other poster in that the temps a lot of folks try to keep house snakes at is usually too high, we do very well with them at standard temps in the ranges normally associated with corns or kings.

Hope that helps,

John Cherry
Cherryville Farms :eatpointe

John, could I get a price list of available House Snakes from you?
lefty_iya@hotmail.com

Phew! Thanks, John, that's a load off of my mind...

Thanks to you too, Trevor, my female is also a little jumpy, which seemed different from how docile they are described as. The male used to be a little nervous too... he bit me right when I unpacked him from his deli cup.... lol

I knew that these snakes were either subtly different from the brown house snakes, or I was just about the world's WORST snake keeper since mine don't seem to be anywhere near as ready to feed as the brown house snakes have been described as being...

I feed my snakes f/t in individual paper bags, but she still won't eat. I tried braining, washing, feeding smaller food, raising temps, lowering temps, misting more, body temp prey, tease feeding, leaving the food in her hidey hole, and of course, her normal unscented prey, but she still hasn't eaten. )(
I wanna strangle her, but that, of course, would be defeating the whole point... lol

One more question... what are the official scientific names of striped and namibian house snakes?

Thanks,
Brenda

Hi John,

I was wondering if you would be interested in posting your caresheet on keeping house snakes. What works for you? Substrates, temps, etc. I have been contemplating adding them to my collection for some time. As far as reproductive efforts, What has been your average clutch size? There are many contradictory care-sheets out there. I would greatly appreciate the knowledge you bring to the table.

Dennis,

I have never reallyput a specific house snake care sheet together, as we are suceesfully keeping them exactly like we do our kings and corns. let me work on it though. I think I just answered an email from you about them.

John Cherry
Cherryville Farms

Thank you, John.

I did send you a private message through this forum but I didn't receive a reply as of yet.
Thanks,

Dennis

Dennis,

This is a copy of an email I sent out today and it shas some of the answers you ask for.


It is no problem at all to share what we have learned over the years working with house snakes. We have been working with them for about 11 or 12 years now and they are a really simple colubrid. As far as care is concerned they do best with exactly the same temperature, feeding and husbandry as a corn snake or king snake. The only real major difference is trying to keep them for laying themselves to death literally. the normal way of breeding kings and corns is to put the females in with the males for several weeks and to try and promote them to breed as many times during that period as you can. If you follow that regimen with house snakes the females will triple and up to 6 times clutch, which is very very detrimental to the females. I have had them back in the early days lay themselves to death. What we do is to put the females in with the males for two or three days and remove them. Often they will at least double clutch and sometimes triple clutch, but usually that is as far as they go, doing it this way. The repetitive clutches are of less and less quality in numbers and also in the viability of the hatching's.

Also from a selective breeding standpoint we try and weed out the females with the propensity to lay clutches too many times, this has been marginally effective over the years.

As far as color phases that we know of the following are the ones we have seen, worked with and/or produced.

Normal
Normal Lace
Green
Green Lace
Black
Black lace
Red
Red Lace
Cinnamon - result of a tan to red breeding last year
Cinnamon Lace - result of tan lace bred to a red lace last year
White Sided
Albino Normal
Albino White Sided
Albino White sided lace
Hypo - almost looks almost like a t-positve albino

Realize these are all color morphs of the Brown African House Snake only.

Additionally there are a number of other species of house snakes such as the aurora, big eyed, striped etc. that we have worked with in the past and they are pretty neat looking animals. But with that said we stopped working with them for basically one reason they all had the same inherent problem in that getting the hatching's to feed on anything was a major problem. Even with scenting with lizards, braining pinks, toads frogs, small fish nothing seemed to work with the exception of force feeding them mouse tails for a period of time till they grew large enough to take a whole pink. On the other hand even though small when they are born probably 85 - 95 % of the brown house snake hatching's will take a newborn pink a few days after initial shedding for a first meal.

As far as sales are concerned, the house snake is an animal that is well received in the hobby. But it is usually after folks have gone thru the initial stages of keeping corns, kings, milks, pythons and boas etc and are looking for something new and that is not in everyone else's collection. In other words something different. We produce a limited number of them each year and breed for color and pattern. We sell out each year and have for many years. It is not a big windfall or anything, but we enjoy them.

Due to the lack of help and some other problems, I have placed all my adult breeders with Don Soderburg of South Mountain Reptiles for this year and he will be producing and marketing all of them.

Hope all this rambling helps and if you have any other questions let me know.

John Cherry
Cherryville Farms

Extremely helpful, John! Thank you. I know those seeking information on this site, will find the information you have provided exceptional.

I appreciate the time and knowledge you have given here. I will be contacting Mr. Soderburg shortly to see what might be available.