Gye Greene's Thoughts

Gye Greene's Thoughts (w/ apologies to The Smithereens and their similarly-titled album!)

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Bye bye snakey

On Feb. 6th -- or maybe the day before -- a carpet snake (a constrictor; not venomous) took up residence among one of the boxes on our front porch. Every day before work, and every evening after I got home, I'd take a look to see if it was still there. It was always in its hole among the boxes, except for two or three times where it was out on the grass (in front of its hole), sunning itself.

On the second or third day, I noticed the cluster of leathery white things, about the size of a deflated soccer ball. Initially it was in the snake's hole, where the snake wrapped itself around it. Upon closer (but not too close!!!) examination, I decided it was a cluster of eggs. Neat-o!!!


After a few days, it had shoved the egg cluster out of its hole -- presumably to catch some warmth from the sun.

And, yesterday, I noticed that snakey had wandered away. Still not back today -- so, who knows?

Egg cluster is still there, though. I gently pushed it sideways, with a stick. It has a fair amount of weight -- like a medium-sized water balloon. So, yeah -- baby snakeys are probably in there.


--GG

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2 Comments:

At June 21, 2014 4:16 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

I realize I am very late, but what happened to the eggs? Did they eventually hatch? That would be surprising if the female didn't come back to incubate them further.

 
At June 21, 2014 12:07 PM, Blogger Gye Greene said...

Heh! They hatched. I don't know much about reptiles, but I have a hunch that they don't "incubate" eggs like birds do -- they just leave 'em (e.g. sea turtles).

Somewhere in a follow-up blog entry I have snapshots of little "fingerling" snakes crawling about.

Aha! The Feb 18 entry -- http://gyegreene.blogspot.com.au/2011_02_01_archive.html

--GG

 

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