suecornish said:
Once she starts eating I lower her into the carrier and close the lid. After she is done I put her in her tank. So, I want to know how everyone else feeds their corns.
Most of my snakes are in a rack, each tub labelled with the snake's name. Each snake has a Sterilite shoebox feeding container with a lid. At feeding time, I pull the feeders from the freezer, put them in ziplock baggies which are weighed down in the sink under hot tap water. While I wait for the feeders to thaw, I pull snakes out of their vivs. I grab the stack of shoeboxes and pull off one at a time. I look at the name on the feeding container and pull the appropriate snake. As I pull the snake, I also pull its water bowl and drop it in a pail.
When the feeders are warm enough, I open each shoebox and drop in the correct size food. While the snakes ponder eating, I wash the water bowls. All of the snakes start off stacked in one area. As each snake eats its first mouse, I move it to another area and offer a second. If it eats a second, I move it back into its viv, checking for excrement, and replacing and refilling the water bowl. The empty shoebox gets stacked up in an "Ate 2" pile.
If a snake hasn't eaten its first mouse after an hour, I put it back into its viv and stack its shoebox separately from the ones who have eaten, in the "Ate 0" pile. Any snake that ate one but hasn't eaten the second after a half hour gets put back and the shoebox stacked in the "Ate 1" pile. As I put snakes away, I look for sheds. Any I find go into the empty feeding container.
I take each of the stacked shoeboxes over to my computer so I can record feds and sheds. Because I already separated them into eaten zero, one or two, it's easy to update my records in Scerp's database program, which I highly recommend. As I finish updating a snake's record, the shoebox gets stacked off to the side. If I find a shed in a shoebox, it reminds me to update the shed record as well.
I'm probably making this sound much more difficult than it is. By always following the same routine, I don't have to try to remember who ate what or who shed when. Not all snakes eat on the same day, though it is just the very young (less than a year) that get fed more than once a week. They are in smaller vivs than the rack, but I use a similar system. Each baby has a deli cup feeding container, again with its name, and its name is on the container it lives in, so no one gets swapped accidentally.
I have to be a stickler for names on tubs and vivs because I have several snakes that look remarkably similar. I couldn't tell some of my snakes apart without a magnifying glass. Gummi looks like Chiclet, Steve looks like Edie, and Medger looks like Lena, and a lot like Xanadu. Okay, I can tell Xanadu apart if the light is strong enough, since she's a ghost and Medger and Lena are anerys, but you get my drift. There just comes a day when you realize that you're losing track of who is who, that they change too much with each shed to "remember" what they look like: they don't look like that in their new birthday suits.
Edit: After reading the other responses, I realize I provide WAY TMI. Sorry about that. I tend to babble. :shrugs:
Nothing fancy.
