More Monty

Monty continues to grow and do well. He got snake mite last week (possibly from the wood we put in which it turns out hadn’t been treated by the pet store) so has had a couple of treaments (more or less spraying his enclosure with a mite spray then putting him back in while it’s still cloudy) to kill them off. I think this is under control now.A part from this he has been going fine, eating and growing and has successfully had his first shed.He is contained in a smaller plastic tub inside his full sized enclosure while he’s small, so last night I thought we’d leave the lid off the small tub and see what happened. Within a few minutes he’s climbed out and decided to settle on the thermostats on the back of the big enclosure.

It’s hard to say, but he’s probably almost 50cm long these days.

We left him out over night, interested to see what would happen. It was a surprise when I came back this morning and I couldn’t see him. I thought maybe he’d climbed back into the tub into his log, nothing there, not under the newspaper, not hidden in the corners of the big tank.I was just starting to think he’d somehow escaped when I noticed him in the top corner of the tank, curled around and through the safety cage on the heat lamp. It was pretty amazing — he managed to bridge a gap of around 30cm or more from the top edge of the small tank to reach the lights and then once there, forced his way through the very small mesh encaging the lights to make himself comfortable near the night heat lamp that was on.It was a near escape really because had he settled on the Day Lamp when it was on he would of burnt himself. As it is, I had a lot of “fun” this morning, trying to get an increasingly angry snake out of the tight spot he’d put himself into. Fortunately by poking him a bit he was encouraged to slither out, I then just had to hold him while he slowly wriggled through the small hole. The mesh size is around 7 – 8mm square and he could only get through by putting his head on the diagonal and then pushing hard to pop his head through. The body seemed to come through fine once this was done.I think we’ll wait until he’s a bit bigger (or maybe move the tank inside) before we let him roam the big tank!