So it happened. Your house snake has escaped :(  Yes it sucks and you probably feel bad right now. It happens to a lot of us though K? Nothing you can do about the past. What matters right now is that they get found safe right?

Step 1: Take a deep breath. Do NOT panic. Its called panic blindness. In highly emotional states we human beings are not as effective at seeing even obvious things. Scarey as it is, your snake has better odds if you remain calm. Blaming yourself, getting frustrated or angry will only hurt your chances at a successful recovery so step #1- deep breaths. keep calm. 

Step 2: Secure the area from hazards and exits. Look for, and remove, anything dangerous in the room and gate off the room that it escaped from. They usually don't travel far. Of course keep any cats or other pets out of there for now. 

Please do not use glue traps!! People will say it works to glue trap them. In larger snakes like ball pythons this has worked, so people will say that about all snakes. It is true it will keep them in place, and yes that may be less lethal than if they get caught by a cat etc., but these guys are way smaller than a ball python that could potentially wiggle part of their face free to keep breathing. If a house snake gets their face stuck down to the trap and it covers or closes their nose and mouth they will suffocate and die. It's not hard to do at this size. Even if they don't the glue will scrape the skin off their scales which can create body wide infections, then sepsis, then death. It's a painful way to die too. Imagine the majority of your skin being ripped off. So please no glue traps. In fact, look for anything sticky in the room like duct tape or anything like that and remove that.  It's just not a solution here. 

Look out for and mesh off heater vents in the floor (window screen wrapped around the registers works), turn off fly zappers, anything you see that could hurt them neutralize the threat. Do this first. They aren't going to be moving much in daylight so its not going to set you back to do this first. Yes we want to find them, but its more important to find them alive, so do this part first. 

Once you've secured the area, it's time to get searching.

A lot of times you will find them very nearby their enclosure in a dark tight space. Most people will tear apart a room from a standing position. Im going to tell you to "think snake". Get all the way down on the floor, with the back of your head touching the floor, near the enclosure and look up. You'll see places you might have missed that way. You may even see them. Systematically go about the room looking from the perspective of on the floor looking up. This is their point of view, so you can see the routes you might not have noticed from a top down position. Dont assume something is too high for them to climb to or too little etc. Just look anyway. 

Once you've gone through that and still haven't found them, sprinkle some powder on the floor in a grid like pattern. This way if they travel they will disturb the powder and you'll be able to see which grid(s) they've been in and what direction they are travelling. This will help you focus the search. They'll come out at night, so turn off the lights and let them think its night time.
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There are commercial ones you can buy at like bass pro shops or you can even make your own. Place a towel or something over it so that its dark and place near the enclosure, Some like to place them ontop of a regulated heating pad, I dont find that works better per se in a warm enough room, but its a good idea if the room is cold. you dont want it too warm though, 80 degrees or so is plenty. 

​*Water* is a better bait than food. They can survive weeks without food but water- not so much. But a live harmless small prey like a pinky can help entice them to enter too. if you need to choose, water is better.​

Once you've done what you can to do the first search, its time to fix the source of the escape. Maybe the lid gap tolerance was just too loose. Gaps between two sliding glass openings are notorious culprits. maybe there are cord ports that need to be secured a bit. Maybe someone just goofed and left it open for whatever reason. Find it and address it.  It doesn't do you much good to find an escapee to have them escape again. If you are using a commercial produced enclosure odds are very good someone else has had an animal escape it before and has solved it already. Google it and youll likely find out. 

Eventually you will have done what you can, and continuing to look is only exhausting or frustrating you further (remember rule #1!). Its ok to turn off the lights and try again tomorrow. This may just move them into a better position for you to find them.

Lastly, don't give up! Many snakes are found within the first few days. Some are found weeks or even months later! Snakes are resourceful and since you have provided them a safe environment to be captured in, they have good chances to survive! So keep trying.

I hope that helps :) 

For egg eating snakes, periods of not eating really is the #1, and practically only, anxiety producing thing about them. So lets go over it. 

First thing first, I'm sure you already went over the usual husbandry stuff of temperature/humidity /security (hide)? No? Start there first. Yeah? Ok moving on. 

So it's important to know that egg eaters in the wild are boom/bust feeders. This means that they will eat as much as they can for about 3 months (while the birds are laying) and then not eat for the rest of the year. So your egg eater may just not be hungry. Its very normal for them, it doesn't mean there is anything wrong. 

But ok, lets assume they are or may be... 

If you've been consistently syringe feeding them, the odds are high that they just aren't hungry enough to make the effort to take down the egg. Why put in the work when you can get your human to do it for you right? 😂 

So as odd as it sounds if you want that baby to eat eggs, sometimes you gotta stop feeding them to get them feeding. Now you can only do that safely if you know how much they weigh, so you'll need a microgram scale, weigh them, stop feeding them by syringe for 2 weeks, weigh again. If they've lost more than 10% of their body weight, syringe feed until they're back at weight. If not, offer the egg that week see what happens.

If the concern with the syringe feed is that they aren't growing enough to gain size, then the best thing to do would be to use the smallest egg possible and add some of the powdered quail egg to bring up the nutrient density. that will help them grow. There's more details on why that is here.

Having that said, they really don't grow as noticeably as carnivorous snakes do. If you were to "power feed" them (which again is normal for them), they may gain 2-4x their bodies weight in a year- which is still massive growth!  So if they started at say 3g, they might weigh 6-12g within the first year. For a carnivorous snake that starts at 150g getting to 450 is a huge visible difference, but when your egg eating snake starts so tiny, and the change occurs so slowly- it's totally understandable to be anxious about if they are gaining weight. So what to do is to get a gram scale (that can measure in 10ths of a gram for hatchlings), and weigh them whenever you need that reassurance. That way you can see the progress easier.

It can be a little anxiety producing, especially if you come from a carnivorous snake background. Hey Im used to it, and I still do it regularly so it's totally normal to have a little anxiety about it. So get you a gram scale. It helps. 

Ok so now that we've gone over those things, let's talk about what to try to get them onto the eggs.

First up we need to know if the eggs are good. They won't eat them no matter what we do if the eggs are bad or have started to develop a chick inside (no longer entirely liquid).

To test if eggs are good, use the float test. Submerge the egg in water; if it sinks and lies horizontally, it's fresh. If it floats or tilts upward, it's old or bad. Additionally, crack one of the eggs open and inspect the white. It should be thick, slightly cloudy, and not watery. If the white is watery, it's likely an older egg.

Sometimes suppliers collect eggs over several days to acquire enough to send in one shipment, and some bird species have only an 18 day incubation from laid to hatch, so if the egg is starting to develop an embryo (there's parts that are no longer liquid) the snake won't eat them. 

Another thing to consider is how you may be storing them. If you're keeping them in the fridge with your other food items, sometimes the smells from the other food can make egg shells smell odd.

This is especially true of commercially bought eggs because, along with other criteria, for an egg to be USDA-grade, it's required by law that eggshells be sanitized before being packaged and sold. As a result, this process strips the eggshells of their natural protective oils — which makes the shells smell less bird like and the thousands of tiny pores in the shell more easily permeated by strong odors that could be lurking in your fridge. Onions are a notable offender. 

The solution here is to store them in an air tight plastic carton, you can get a basic pack of two off of Amazon for $10 here. Theres fancier models that you can record the dates with and stuff like that too. 

Is my house snake the right size for its age? 

It's a fairly common question- and it comes from the right place. Everybody wants to know if their animal is on the right track. That is perfectly normal. 

No worries though! Odds are very good that it is. I'll explain. 

One source of confusion about this is that people sometimes make this assessment by making comparisons to others that may have limited or flat out false information about the snake they are comparing to.

For example- unfortunately sometimes people who are selling wildcaught animals dont know the age of an animal, dont know how long it takes for a hatchling to get to that size, so they just guess. They'll say like oh its a year old, (basing that guess off of other snakes growth) when in reality is a full grown breedable male that could be seven years old already- but that person doesn't know better, buys the animal, and then shows it to their friends. Of course their friend wants one after seeing how cool they are and decides to get a hatchling. A year later its no where near the size of their friend's snake and they start to wonder, "why isn't mine growing? is something wrong with my snake? Nope. Not at all. 

We also can (understandably) end up with misunderstandings when we carry assumptions and concerns from the keeping of one species to another t00. 

For example- house snakes are not like ball pythons on this subject. Ball pythons have very consistent hatchling and growth weights across their growing years, so you can really use that predictable and linear growth to assess how things are going over time. Unfortunately, this predictable linear growth does not exist in house snakes. So there is not, and can not be, a set schedule of by x age they "should" be Y grams for house snakes. It just doesn't work that way. 

There's a few reasons for this, one of them is that house snakes regularly don't have a consistent starting point. They can hatch out at 2g or three times that. It's really all over the board. That's normal for housies. In ball pythons, an exceptionally small hatchling is rare, and often leads to poor outcomes. Which explains some of the X weight by Y age concern. This is not so in house snakes.

There's some theories as to why this happens (studies done in other snake species) that suggest an evolutionary advantage to having variability in clutch/hatchling size in the wild, but I digress...

So why does this matter? Well because vastly different starting points can influence our perception of the animals growth over time. 

For example, let's set up a comparison.

Say two different eggs of the same species/morph hatch on the same day.  Hatchling A, a female, is born at a tiny 2 grams, and hatchling B, a male, is born at 6 grams. 

Both hatchlings are fairly consistent feeders, A is voracious, and B is a little more shy. He prefers his food easier to eat. He's growing, he isn't losing weight. He has great body condition. He's just not in a hurry to eat everything in sight like A is,  

Fast forward several months. Hatchling A is now 7 grams, more than tripling in size! Hatchling B is 10 grams. A steady weight gain, but not even double yet, definitely not as impressive as A's. 

Now if we set a *standard* that says all house snake hatchlings *should* be 10 grams by X months old... than hatchling B is "on track", but hatchling A is "too small for her age", and false assumptions are made about her health etc.

In reality, hatchling A isn't "behind", she's actually growing faster than B, by quite a bit.

Another thing to keep in mind is that growth is not perfectly linear in house snakes. As anyone who has known the agony of raising an aurora to breeding size can tell you! This means that they go through periods of rapid growth, and also periods of stagnation where time passes but growth is limited or stagnant. So again, we end up comparing apples to oranges. 

Another thing to note is weight alone is not a reliable marker for health. Its just a number when taken out of context of the full picture.

Some animals start from behind in life like A, some snakes like B are fit but not in a rush to get big- that doesn't automatically mean that they're in poor health or weren't taken care of. So cut yourself some slack if your housie isn't as big as you thought it would be by X age. These are really small snakes so weight can vary by a lot and still not be determinate of any meaningful conclusion. 

So if there isn't any hard X by Y numbers, then how do we assess?

Take a look at the body condition:

Are there loose folds of skin? Sunken eyes? Visible spine? Head seem a bit large, disproportionate to the body? That would be a indication that your snake is underweight. So feed them more heavily (if they will eat it) or more often.

Does your snake seem otherwise healthy, but you doubt it would be able to race off quickly if it needed to? Do you have difficulty feeling its ribs and spine under its chonk? Does the head seem a bit small, disproportionate to body? Does the body seem considerably wider at the bottom than the top? That's obesity. Which is just as dangerous if not more so to a snake as being too thin. In this case you would feed less of course.

An ideal body condition for a snake would be muscular, you should be able to feel the ribs without much pressure. Think "fit". 

If they are 'fit' there's really no need to sweat it if they aren't the same size as their peers, even compared to their siblings. One good growth spurt and they can shoot right up there. Even if they don't that doesn't mean that it will effect their quality of life.

They are all individuals, like us. Think about it in human terms. A professional horse jockey will be roughly between 4'10" and 5'2" and weigh between 105-115lbs. A professional basketball player is 6'7" tall and weights 215lbs on average. Both must be incredibly physically fit and in peak health to perform. 

There are evolutionary advantages and disadvantages for each side of the spectrum, both sizes and everything in between.  Forgive me for using an analogy, but you cant expect all housies to be a "basketball players", and you cant expect them to be "horse jockeys" either.

No amount of withdraw or neglect will turn a basketball player into a healthy horse jockey. Regardless of size, if they aren't getting what they need, they wont look healthy.  Their body condition will whither, vital functions will shut down, and they will eventually die. You cant "stunt" a house snake, only thin or fill it out.

Also no amount of "powerfeeding" will turn a horse jockey into a healthy basketball player. You just end up with an obese horse jockey. As obesity is the #1 risk factor for liver failure in house snakes, this is dangerous long term.
 
A note for breeders: While its true you may be able to get a basketball player to their adult size faster with a strong feeder, you should know he's still not going to play until his time ;) And yes a healthy horse jockey will absolutely still perform in his time too. So there's no reason to risk it. 

All that attempting to change your snake into something it's not will do is harm the snake. Again, it is body condition, not size or age, that should really matter.

There are of course the minimum and maximum sizes, but those are averages for when they are adults. Point is, it is more important that the animal is healthy. Does it have good body condition? Does it eat regularly? Is it active? Does it poop and shed and do those things snakes are supposed to? Yes? Then having X vs Y rules to measure against isn't going to tell you anything you don't already know. :) 

I hope that helps some.

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