Starring Walker and Morse

Our two young pet snakes are just delightful and still growing. Morse, now over 2 feet long, sometimes types with me at the computer, snugly wrapped around my wrist. He might just be the most docile, lazy corn snake in all the docile corn snake world. I don’t want to use the word boring, but he at least makes boring look good. He is just so nonchalant about absolutely everything.

Normally when the snakes shed, they do it in the privacy of their habitat. One day I took the snakes out to feed them, and Morse, a motley-patterned corn snake, started rubbing his cute little head all over the towel I had him on.

Next thing we knew, we were watching the full shedding process, something I’d never witnessed before. The shed skin rolled off him like old-style stockings, until toward the tail’s end it reversed and extended as Morse pulled away from it. Shedding done, Morse was quite ready to eat!

Walker, the corn/rat snake hybrid, has all the expected instincts of a snake, and that makes him great to observe, because he is certainly observing you and everything else. I like to wander around with him so that he can safely explore new things. Though we feed our snakes thawed rodents, he attacks his dead prey with all ferocity. We use tongs so that we are not handling the mice directly, and if I hold onto the end of a mouse for a just a couple of seconds after Walker’s latched on, he quickly coils all around the mouse, constricting it just like all good constrictors do. I have got to videotape it sometime.

Walker and Morse are destined to be teaching snakes. They had their first classroom visit of sorts at the Master Naturalist training this past spring. Here my friend Christine tried to take a picture of Walker, but of course Walker had other ideas.

Sssssimply wonderful!