There's no other way to start this article off. She was my first. Everyone remembers their first, right? Often fondly.
I don't.
Baby was a bitch.
Angry, defensive, jumpy and always, always hungry.
Context before we get into it. Baby was a Californian kingsnake (Lampropeltis californiae), an albino banded Californian kingsnake, and I had her in the summer of 1996. The internet was in its infancy. Slow dial-up modems that would tie up the landline — more a novelty at this point than a useful research tool — less than 300,000 websites and no Google.
I had a book. I still have that book — Ronald G. Markel's care guide, Kingsnakes and Milk Snakes — and for its day it was the pinnacle of care information for kingsnake and milksnake species available in captivity.
After carefully picking the Californian kingsnake as my first snake, my parents got her for me as a birthday gift. I was over the moon! My first snake, my first reptile, and she was gorgeous. Six months old, 15 inches long and a beautiful pink colour with yellow bands and bright, almost ethereal eyes.
I was in love.
The care was modern for the time and consisted of a 24-inch vivarium, specialist sawdust snake bedding, an 11-watt square heat mat, two hides and a large, heavy water bowl. An appropriately sized mouse every 7–14 days and I was set.
Baby started off fine. Interactive, feeding well and easily handled.
She was perfect.
Then it all changed.
At around her third year she became aggressive, simultaneously defensive and very bitey. On the very rare occasions I'd try to handle her, I'd get bitten and musked on repeatedly until I graciously gave up and bravely ran away.
What had happened to my beautiful Baby?
Her enclosure was the same. The heat was the same — or the thermostat said it was. She was cleaned and fed and watered.
So why had she become a devil in pink?
Hindsight is 20/20
Looking back, I can pick out a number of issues with how I kept my Baby. Enclosure size, temperature gradient, available hides, diet and, in my more recent years of herpetoculture, behavioural affordances.
So, what did my young, bad self do about Baby's increasingly bad behaviour?
Nothing.
All the literature was telling me I was doing it correctly.
Everything was perfect.
But something was clearly wrong.
The enclosure hadn't changed. Baby had.
A six-month-old juvenile and a three-year-old kingsnake aren't necessarily the same husbandry proposition simply because they're the same individual. She'd grown physically, her spatial requirements had changed, she'd matured, her feeding ecology and energy demands had changed, and the opportunities available to a 15-inch juvenile had become increasingly restrictive to an adult animal.
I didn't change with her.
I never allowed her the opportunity to do anything outside of her embarrassingly small enclosure. In my inexperience, cluelessness and youthful stupidity, I hadn't given my now-grown kingsnake the ability to do much of anything from an adult perspective.
Turns out I wasn't very good at this hobby.
I didn't ask enough questions. I didn't search for other answers. It never occurred to me that an enclosure perfectly adequate for a baby might not be appropriate for an adult of the species.
Next steps
I did the only thing I could think of at the time.
I visited my local reptile specialist.
This wasn't the shop I'd purchased Baby from and, once the small local business found this out, they were very uninterested in helping me — other than selling me some snake sausages.
So I went to the next nearest shop.
Then the next.
Then the next.
And finally the last one within driving distance before my dad completely lost his mind.
They were slightly more accommodating and helped me reach a conclusion:
You need to get her a bigger enclosure.
Blindingly obvious, right?
Apparently not to me.
Time for a change
I saved every penny I could to buy Baby an upgrade. I worked extra shifts at my part-time kitchen porter job, did jobs for my mom and even went to work with my dad to help him in his job as a transport engineer, maintaining a fleet of vans and cars.
I doubt I was much help, but I could make a cracking cup of tea and my X-rated jokes were on par with men twice my age.
After three long months of graft, while still trying to navigate school, upcoming GCSEs and youth-fuelled girlfriends, I finally had enough money to get her new enclosure.
Off we went, my dad still playing chauffeur — thanks, old man — to collect a huge 36 × 18 × 18-inch vivarium. And because I'd rung ahead and asked them to keep it for me, they were throwing in a shiny new LED strip, because this was apparently the next big thing in reptile keeping.
I instantly loved it.
Oak wood effect. Large and spacious. New lights. And my dad treated me to a new branch for Baby too.
She was going to have a palace!
Moving Day
I placed Baby in a pillowcase for the move, as I had to transfer her heat mat, hides and substrate over to her new digs.
She almost immediately musked all over it.
That's fine. As long as she's safe and secure.
Then, during all the excitement, I had a sudden moment of clarity.
That's NOT fine. That pillowcase is my mother's.
Oh bollocks...
Everything moved across. Heat mat secured, substrate in place, an extra hide — now three in total — branch positioned, lights on.
In she went.
Savaging me gently on the way out of the bag and into the new enclosure, obviously.
Then she touched the substrate and paused.
This was a big thing.
Normally, on being returned to her vivarium, Baby would rocket into the nearest hide, tail buzzing the whole way. This time she didn't.
She sat there and tongue-flicked.
There was more space around her. New objects. New smells. Things she'd never encountered in her old enclosure. She tentatively slid from my grasp and started exploring.
Then she apparently realised that a small portion of her tail was still touching me.
Fuck that.
She slid quickly into the nearest hide and started tail buzzing.
Fair enough.
I left her to it.
A few days later
I was changing her water bowl, something I'd normally been cautious about. This time I had newfound confidence in both my ability as a reptile keeper and Baby's new house.
I'd done a good thing for my animal. I'd improved her husbandry. She could do nothing but benefit from it and, obviously, I would receive fewer bites and muskings.
She bit me.
She came flying out of that stupid third hide I'd got for her, clamped onto my hand briefly, then ran away.
Bitch.
I remember thinking that I was never going to get a handle on her. I couldn't influence her behaviour. I couldn't change her behaviour.
So I stopped trying.
Instead, I gave her the best care I could. The perfect-sized mice, the cleanest water, the cleanest enclosure. Everything I could do to make sure she was comfortable and content.
I eventually broadened her diet, almost accidentally.
And no, it wasn't sausages.
I'd already tried them and Baby had turned up her delicate nose. But a freshly caught robin dragged in by the cat?
That went down well.
That inspired me to try a day-old chick, a rat pup, a rabbit leg at one point. All were taken with gusto. She enjoyed them and very often came back looking for more.
I tried.
What was next?
I eventually found myself in an early internet chat room where someone, not very far from me, had a male kingsnake and was searching for someone with a female.
We naturally got talking.
We discussed the possibility of breeding our two animals. We discussed incubators, hatchling housing...
He was excited to breed his male. I was excited to breed Baby.
It was a date.
I arrived early one April evening with Baby in a pillowcase — one of mine this time.
My new friend and I had been speaking for a number of months and had agreed to try our breeding project in April, coinciding broadly with their natural breeding season.
Both animals had been well fed — Baby was borderline chubby at this point — and both appeared to be in peak health.
All the pieces were set. Everything was in place.
We were ready to go.
Dinner time
Long story short.
Baby ate him.
I was being shown my friend's glorious collection of animals — Chinese water dragons, royal pythons and curious little anoles — and we took too long.
We took our eyes off the ball.
And one of those balls was intensely ophiophagous.
She ate him.
She was down to the tail by the time we got back to the breeding vivarium.
Were my cheeks red.
I was so apologetic. I was devastated for my friend's loss.
We both knew the risk involved in pairing kingsnakes. Snake-eating is a well-established part of Lampropeltis feeding ecology, so we'd agreed that we would monitor them until we either saw courtship and mating or hunting behaviour.
We did not.
What came next
After leaving my friend's house with my head hung in shame and a considerably chunkier kingsnake, I returned home.
For the next few months, I worked with Baby and accomplished pretty much nothing. She remained a nasty piece of work, and nothing would change her mind.
She woke up every single morning and chose violence.
Or poo.
Sometimes both.
Looking back now, there are things in Baby's story that make me wince. Feeding her a wild robin dragged in by the cat is fairly high on the list. Parasites, disease, contamination — pick a reason. I wouldn't dream of doing it now.
Why did I do it then?
Boredom? Curiosity? Stupidity? Naivety?
Pick one. They're all true.
But that's rather the point.
I wasn't born knowing how to keep reptiles. None of us were. I learned by reading, asking questions, getting things wrong and, occasionally, doing something spectacularly stupid and realising afterwards that perhaps I shouldn't do that again.
During this time, I happened upon a royal python who continued my obsession with everything reptilian.
Baby, for all her unsociable behaviour and piss-poor attitude, had started me down a path that would last my entire life.
One I would be lucky enough to work in.
One that would eventually lead me to my beloved fiancée, Penny.
One that would inspire me to start my own herpetological consultancy.
One that would inspire two books, a white paper, countless articles and the opportunity to become a published writer.
And one that I love to this day.
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