Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

August 17, 2006

Friday, er, Thursday Snake Blogging

Filed under: Personal,Photography,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 9:39 pm

img_1936_m.jpgTook the day off and spent most of it working on the snake terrarium. Watching him pace (hmm, that doesn’t seem like the right word for a snake) his cage today made me particularly sad and motivated me to get about 95% finished. He could actually move in now – the only things missing are the decorative frames around the side vents. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the terrarium. There are a number of things that I would do differently next time, but some things will definitely stay the same. For example, I used plexiglass for the front which made the whole thing significantly lighter. The plexiglass was about $20 more expensive but definitely worth it. And here’s the (near) finished terrarium. Next time I post about this, we’ll be completely done and have the snake moved in.

img_1931.jpgIn other snake news, K caught a picture of an eastern hog nose in its red phase in our front yard last week. S/he’s an absolutely beautiful snake. In case you can’t quite tell from the picture, the snake is extremely red at the front and it gradually fades to yeallow at the tail. Your science tidbit for the day: the eastern hog nose eats the occassional small mammal, but is particularly well adapted to eating frogs and toads. As you can imagine, the amphibians don’t like being eaten and have a tendency to inflate to prevent a snake from swallowing them. The eastern hog nose has its fangs in the upper back of its mouth. These fangs are used to paralyze and “deflate” a swollen frog to enable swallowing. The eastern hog nose apparently also plays dead if it can’t drive off predators. When it plays dead, it goes limp and sticks its tongue out – which, IIRC, is how I played dead when I was five.

1 Comment

  1. Great looking piece of furniture–and to think it will house a snake as well.

    Comment by Bettejean Cramer — August 22, 2006 @ 7:49 am

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