Having Mohr Snakes…..
When I began breeding cornsnakes it happened like many of the newbie's we see on the forums…by accident. I was cohabbing several corns in a display enclosure in the science department at my undergraduate university. Lo and behold, one day….eggs! Well, it was a fast lesson and back in that time the only real way to figure out information was from those rectangular things called books. Nevertheless, I gathered information and successfully hatched my first corns….normals….but I was hooked. I had loved cornsnakes for years before and usually kept them in separate enclosures but when my "fish feeding" days in the dorms were noticed by those in power…they were banished to one display in the biology department.
As many of you know, for the past 3 years I have been engrossed in my PhD program studying timber rattlesnakes. I surgically implanted radio transmitters into some of these snakes and followed them throughout the habitat and recorded every imaginable variable. Over the past couple of months I have been taking out the remaining transmitters as my PhD is coming to a close. The ending of this research starts a new era for me….
I have had some sort of snake collection for the last 20 years with cornsnakes taking the major priority during the last 10 or so. Raising snakes was always a fun passion for me and I have enjoyed pairing things up and watching the eggs hatch or live births begin. In the beginning it was really about the fun of breeding and seeing what I could produce and if I sold a few, that was great. After a few years, I bumped the collection up and produced even more snakes. Fast forward a few more years and the collection was bumped up even more with every holdback to every project taking up more and more space. In fact, I eventually ran out of spare rooms and built a custom building to house everything. Ultimately, however, that too reached the limit to where every cage was filled and in order to get a new snake I needed to sell an old one. At one time back in the day it used to take a couple of hours to feed and clean everything and now I am lucky to get done with one section of cages in a day.
With my doctorate in hand, I have new opportunities available. Teaching, researching, and traveling, are just some of the new prospects in front of me. In addition, over the past few years I have cultivated a strong interest in woodworking and there is a market I have started to develop in that venue. (A nice advantage to woodworking is I can leave for more than a few days and not worry my wood is not getting water or the lumber might do something stupid or the electricity will go out and have fatal consequences. Best of all….I can "brumate" the lumber anytime and for as long as I want.)
Ever since I have owned reptiles I have been giving educational presentations and I foresee a continuation of this endeavor and continued maintenance of an educational collection. What I do not see, however, is the increase or even the maintenance of a moderately large, one person cornsnake operation producing 1000+ eggs every year. All that said….before you think I am retiring or getting out of the business let me assure you that I am not. I will be keeping a much smaller cornsnake collection of focused projects so my days can go back to having a little more free time rather than spending every spare minute cleaning, feeding, cleaning, feeding, feeding, cleaning, cleaning, feeding, etc. Instead of keeping 4.8 of a project, I will whittle that down to a 1.2 or 2.2. The 2.3 groups will probably go to 1.1 pairs and some projects will be eliminated altogether.
Consequently, there will be some very nice adults, juveniles, and hatchlings available in the next couple of months. I do not have a set date on when I will sell the animals but I expect to have some sort of list in advance of Daytona so pick-up arrangements can be made for those foreign buyers as well as continental buyers. Since I am not retiring or getting out of the business, I am in no immediate need to liquidate all of the projects/animals and there is not a "must sell by" date that I am working against. Consequently, low ball offers will be ignored and if you are waiting around for a drastic sale you may be waiting for an event that never happens. In fact, since I have not signed any dotted lines for teaching offers or research opportunities, I am free to continue the snake thing and if I cannot sell some of these animals it will not be hard to talk myself back into keeping them. ;)
