Lilly

Lilly is my sub adult corn snake. I've had her since she was a hatchling and it has been a blast watching her grow. She now measures close to 3' in length and is slightly fatter than my thumb. Lilly feeds once a week on frozen thawed hopper mice. Frozen thawed is the way to go for feeding your snake. Live mice can attack your snake and cause serious injury. A pre killed frozen mouse or rat has been humanely euthanized and is completely safe for your snake. It's just as awesome to watch a snake eat a pre killed prey item, and it's guilt free! Lilly lives in a 20 gallon long aquarium, I use sanichips as a substrate and she has pleanty of places to hide on both the cool and warm ends of
her tank.

In the beginning of October Lilly escaped. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before and I was completely shocked! I underestimated the will power of our cats. Somehow, the let Lilly out of her tank and off she went to god only knows where. After setting many 'traps' and searching the house top to bottom with a high power flash light we still hadn't found her. Almost a month after her escape, when I had started to give up hope, I went out onto the balcony to find Lilly laying out in the open! She was super cold and had some stuck on shed but otherwise seemed ok. I put her right into the warm tank and let her rest. The following day I gave her a warm water soak to help with her hydration and notticed some scale rot. I scrubbed it with chlorohexadine scrub 3 days in a row, after which she shed and the scale rot was removed with the old skin! Normally, when a reptile gets scale rot it's important to get them to a vet ASAP. This type of infection can quickly become systemic and endanger the life of your herp! This just happened to take place on a weekend when my reptile vet was closed and thankfully, it worked out well.

Lilly is the coolest snake I've ever had. Corn snakes are a fantastic beginner reptile, but they're still exciting for even the experienced keeped. Speaking of experience, I'm not a novice keeper and my snake still managed to get loose. Accidents happen, even to the best of us, and it's always important to be prepared for anything. If I know one thing to be true about keeping reptiles in your life it's that things are never boring or predictable!