Pacific Boa Constrictor Snakes (Candoia bibroni bibroni)

Fiji Boas..................... or Chameleons?

2012-02-07T21:23:00.000-08:00

Fiji Boas are famous for changing colour, but it's hard to catch them at it.

Today I went to clean out their tank and found Constantine under the newspaper at her palest pink, and Magenta under a piece of bamboo in his most brooding dark... and yet some days they are identical.

All the babies out for cleaning...

2012-02-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

Here is a tangle for you! All seven of our adult Fiji boas are in the holding tub while we clean out their tank. These snakes live together in large display tank, and seem to be quite companionable (for snakes....).

Naboo and Hecate

2012-01-07T15:58:00.000-08:00

Our two newest, Naboo and Hecate.

Can anyone name the name references...?

Corrigan!

2011-08-29T19:58:00.000-07:00

The smallest of the batch of babies born on 31 May is, of course, the one we will keep. Born at 7gms, now a hefty 12 gms, she is pounding gecko tails once a week (offered from chopsticks).

And now she has shed her skin for the first time. Here are photos of her pre-shed and feeding, and 48 hours later in her new technicolour skin, glowing and fabulous.

The name Corrigan comes from Celtic folk-lore:

Corrigan, according to the folklore of Brittany is a female færy "Little Queen". She is said to have been one of the ancient druidesses, and therefore malicious towards Christian priests. Corrigan is fond of pretty human children, and is usually blamed for all changeling substitutions.

Vilisi and one of the babies

2011-08-21T19:44:00.000-07:00

Most Fijians are afraid of snakes, so it has been quite an adventure for our housekeeper to get used to the snakes living with us. However here she is with one of the new babies, looking happy to be handling it. I'm hoping she's a new ambassador for protecting Fiji's own boa constrictors!

Babies - finally our own babies arrived - by surprise

2011-06-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

Well, we've had a long, strange journey getting here, but finally we have our own, captive bred, baby Fiji boas!

I had NO IDEA that their mother was pregnant, but Mazikeen, the large female from Kadavu island, after being unusually restless roaming around her tank for the past week, suddenly presented me with 13 babies. Of course she did this at 7.30pm at night when I was due to leave at 6.30am the next morning for 3 weeks travelling....

Fortunately baby snakes are very independent and can live for a month or more on what is left of their yolk sac, so I cleaned them up, checked them out (gloated for a while) left them in a nice clean tank with plenty of hides and water, and off I went.

Now I'm back home with time to look at them closely, feed them for the first time, and take lot and LOTS of photos.

The babies are about 30cm (1 foot) long and weigh around 12 grams each (less than half an ounce). Of the 13, 8 are brown and 5 are orange. However I'm not counting on this continuing, as these babies are like chameleons and can change their colour quite dramatically.

The mother, Mazikeen, is from Kadavu Island, and is brown with irregular blotched patterns. I think the father may be Rifraf, from Taveuni Island - he is brownish pink and has diamond shaped back patterns and a very red belly. So far no red bellies seen in this lot, but they seem to be a mix of diamond and blotchy patterns on their backs.

More photos ahead..

First meal of his/her life

2011-06-21T18:03:00.000-07:00

3 weeks after their birth, I attempted the babies' first feed.

The last pair of babies I had died after regurgitating food. This may have been genetic (as friends with others from the same litter lost theirs in the same way) but of course I'm now paranoid that I had been giving them too large prey animals.

So these babies are starting off very gently with (pre-killed, frozen and thawed out) tiny hatchling geckos, or tails of larger geckos. Here's the first one taking a tail.

Last night 7 of the 13 fed quite easily, taking food gently from tongs. One tried but then refused what may have been too large a gecko, and 5 reacted to the food as though it was going to eat them.

The 7 successful feeders are now in one tank, the 6 who have yet to feed are in another, and I'm starting a frantic mini-gecko hunt!

Babies are climbers!

2011-06-21T17:54:00.001-07:00

Candoia are often called "Ground Boas". Well, here's proof that the Fiji Candoia bibroni bibroni are certainly arboreal for a lot of their life. Not only did Mazikeen climb up to the top branch of her tank to (literally) drop her babies, the first thing they did on being put into their new tank an hour after birth was shoot straight up to the highest point they could find. And even though I provided them with lots of nice toilet roll hides, newspaper layers and dried ferns to burrow in, they still prefer the ridge at the very top of the container. Makes opening the tank an adventure....

How we set up snake tanks

2011-03-01T21:46:00.000-08:00

Out here in the islands we don't have the luxury of buying pre-made snake enclosures, so as ever, necessity has been the mother of invention. Here are the two tank designs that seem to work out best for us (5 year old provides handy size comparison!).

Main display tank:

I have to confess that we inherited this from a much handier enthusiast. I think that if I'd been making it I wouldn't have made it this large, but as it turns out it's been perfect. Our six (nocturnal) snakes all sleep curled up in their hides on the floor during the day, but every night they are out and about climbing around the upper branches, and are usually all in new sleeping positions the next day.

The main body is plywood, with a perspex window, and a door and side panels open to the air, screened with green garden shade cloth. As you don't want any rough edges inside the tank that the snakes can rub against, all inner surfaces are rounded off with wooden beading. The floor is sealed with heavy plastic sheeting (tablecloth!), and lined with newspaper.

Smaller quarters:

Normally all my snakes live together in the main tank. However, sometimes we need to separate them out, and then I use large plastic tubs with air holes drilled in the tops and sides. It's important to make sure that the lids clip closed strongly, as they WILL push open anything loose. I also use plastic tubs to feed them in, I never introduce food into their main living tank.

I use ice-cream tubs for hides, and large, shallow, pottery (NOT metal or teflon) serving dishes for bathing and drinking bowls. I collect branching driftwood from beaches for climbing branches and leave them to bleach and dry in the sun before I use them.

Hope this is of use to anyone wanting to set up a snake enclosure out here - we are lucky that we don't need lights or heat sources, as we are in the snakes' natural environment - it makes life a lot easier!

Lovely head shot

2011-01-09T15:24:00.000-08:00

Samael: Alfies snake

2010-08-02T16:02:00.000-07:00

Alfie's snake named Samael...

Samael (Hebrew: סמאל‎) (also Sammael) is an important archangel in Talmudic and post-Talmudic lore, a figure who is accuser, seducer and destroyer, and has been regarded as both good and evil. It is said that he was the guardian angel of Esau and a patron of the empire of Rome.

Also called Sammael and Samil, he is considered in legend both a member of the heavenly host (with often grim and destructive duties) and a fallen angel, equatable with Satan and the chief of the evil spirits. One of Samael's greatest roles in Jewish lore is that of the angel of death. In this capacity he is a fallen angel but nevertheless remains one of the Lord's servants. As a good angel, Samael supposedly resides in the seventh heaven, although he is declared to be the chief angel of the fifth heaven.

Baby's on Fire......

2010-07-26T22:51:00.000-07:00

Is it a Fiji boa? Is it a fire breathing dragon? You decide....

Well. OK it's boa - and a very tiny one, but such Fire!

Babies are TINY and nights are cold...

2010-07-26T17:08:00.000-07:00

I have two extremes of Fiji Boa size in my house at the moment:
Thomasina (vastly pregnant) I estimate at over 2m long, weighing almost 3Kg, while the two babies we just got from Taveuni, now three weeks old, are about 33 cm long and weigh 11 gms each.

The babies are eating one small frozen (and thawed) house gecko a week (straight from the floor of a feeding cup), while Thomasina really hasn't eaten much at all for the last 2 or 3 months.

It's the coldest time of the year here right now (down to 20oC at night) and the babies are spending all their time curled up into little balls hidden inside dried fern leaves, while Thomasina, who is too fat to coil up tightly, seems to be enjoying a "cushion" made of a locally woven coconut leaf bag filled with fern leaves.

My others are also all curling up under the smallest hides they can fit into at night, (sometimes it's a pile of 3 snakes with a hide riding high on top of them as they all push in at once). They seem more active than normal during the day, which is unusual for these nocturnal snakes - maybe they change their habits in winter so that they can hunt during the warmer days instead of colder nights. They have slowed down from eating every week to only accepting food every 2 weeks or so. Last year they stopped eating altogether in the two coldest months, so I may be able to save on snake food for a while.

Babies! - but not ours......

2010-07-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

Finally we have some new babies - not from our own pregnant snake-in-waiting, but from our friends at Paradise Resort on Taveuni Island. During land clearing a pregnant wild female was found and gave birth in captivity on 29 June. She had 27 live babies, in three different colour ways, many with amazingly orange eyes.

See below for photos taken 9 - 10 days after birth.....

Momma, resting

Babies anytime soon......

2010-05-15T19:31:00.000-07:00

It is now between 6 and 7 months since Thomasina was bred, and as she has put on more than 1Kg (almost twice her body weight), and stopped eating, we think she may be close to giving birth.

Here's a brief run down of her pregnancy:

Date and measurements	Event	Months after mating
14 Oct 2009 (2m long, 1.5 Kg)	Put in with 2 males, mating began immediately	0
7 November 2009	Removed from males	0.75 (3 weeks)
15.Jan 2010 (1.75 Kg)	Putting on weight, feeding weekly on geckos, chicken portions, rats/mice	2 to 3 months
Late Feb	Shed
17 April 2010	Last accepted food, started fasting after this	5 to 6 months
15.May 2010 (2.7 Kg)	"Blue" (getting ready to shed)	6 to 7 months

Reading suggests that Candoia bibroni bibroni may be pregnant for 7 to 9 months before giving birth, but there aren't too many records, so we are preparing now.

I've been drying moss and ferns from the garden and prepared a nesting bed with hide boxes for babies. So far she has not been very impressed with this, and has been ignoring it, lying instead on her normal newspaper under a log hide.

I'm also trying to make her enclosure escape proof - not so easy, as the babies I have seen before have been tiny and just might be able to make it through the plastic mesh of the sides. So I've been attaching soft mosquito netting to the panels, just to be sure.

She's "in blue" right now, showing cloudy eyes getting ready to shed, so she wouldn't be very active anyway, but she's been sitting in one corner of her tank for the last month, not moving around much and can't really coil up tightly any more. I hope for her sake it won't be much longer - she just doesn't look comfortable.

Map of Fiji Islands

2010-04-19T01:04:00.000-07:00

Just to show you where my snakes come from: we have Taveuni, Kadavu and Viti Levu snakes.
See how different they are in the post below

The rest of them!

2010-04-13T22:41:00.001-07:00

I've mostly been posting about Thomasina lately because she may be pregnant, but I thought it was time to give the others some attention.

It's the end of summer here, and they are eating like machines. Currently they are taking frozen (thawed) geckos and chicken portions every week. In winter they sometimes won't eat for a month or longer, but right now they are slamming it down and getting fat! They are also shedding their skins every 2.5 or 3 months, and putting on both length and weight.

First, the original trio from Taveuni Island, two males and a female born in captivity in late 2006. One of these is (hopefully) the father of Thomasina's babies.... The Taveuni snakes have a very diamond shaped back pattern (Thomasina is from Taveuni too) , a lot like the Solomon Island Boas. These three are similar colours, but all can be very changeable. At the moment they all seem to want to be dark brown, but they are capable of changing to pale pink at times. They're about 1m long and weigh between 225 and 275 gms.

Next four small males from the main Fijian island of Viti Levu. These guys were wild caught sometime around 2007 or 2008. Their back patterns are very different from the Taveuni snakes, more blotches than diamonds. I love the colour variations - two dark orange, one brown and one almost silver. Three of these four have "stumpy" tails, probably as the result of some injury or a badly shed skin when they were wild. Consequently they aren't as long as the Taveuni trio, between 70 and 90cm, and weigh between 160 and 250 gm (the silver one is FAT!)

Finally the two larger females from Ono Island near Kadavu. These were recently wild caught by a 10 year old boy, and have been easily handled since then, which just shows you how docile they are. After only a couple of accidental snaps (mistakes at feeding time) they settled in and you'd think they had been captive all their lives. These have a less marked blotchy pattern and plain bellies, are about 1m 60cm long and weigh around 1,200 gms.

No such thing as a little bit pregnant

2010-03-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

Well, Thomasina continues to grow wider and wider, and now I am finally beginning to hope. It's over 5 months since she was originally mated to Rifraf, and as the normal gestation period for this species is quoted as 7-9 months, we may have baby Fiji Boas anytime between mid May and mid August. Last time this snake gave birth she had somewhere between 20 and 30 live babies, so although there are no guarantees, I look forward to a busy time ahead!

Here are a few snaps taken as I cleaned her tank - she is pretty grouchy at the moment, so I am minimising the amount of handling she gets, and trying not to flash the camera in her face too much, but it's pretty clear how thick her body now is, and how the scales on her sides are stretched apart. These photos were taken 4 days after her last feed and after she had defecated the night before, so it can't ALL be food....

Stretched scales on her side

Pregnant or not?

2010-03-22T23:32:00.000-07:00

It's now 4 months since Thomasina was mated to Rifraf (and still he hasn't called....) but I'm still not sure whether she's gravid (pregnant) or just putting on weight. She has a very hearty appetite and eats at least weekly, so she's quite likely to be just a little hefty, but she does feel very firm when handled.

Here are a few pics - see if you can work it out!

October 2009, the blushing bride before mating
January 2010, 2 month after separation
February 2010, 3 months after separation
Early March 2010, 3.5 months after separation
Late March 2010, 4 months after separation (and just fed)
And here is Lilith - a smaller female, unmated, also having just fed, for comparison.

Any opinions can be left in comments - guess we'll know for sure about June or July.

Snake release

2010-01-05T15:57:00.000-08:00

A beautiful large female Fiji Boa was brought in to Nature Fiji, a local nature conservation society, rescued from a development site in the forests of Viti Levu Island (the main island of Fiji).

We photographed her, checked that she had not been hurt in the capture (she hadn't, so kudos to those who picked her up), and (I have to admit with considerable reluctance on my part and very active encouragement on Stuart's part) released her into another forested area not currently threatened by development.

She is VERY dark, almost black in her main patterns, and has the black belly stripe we are starting to see is a characteristic of the Viti Levu Island snakes. She was also quite fat, so may have just eaten or may be about to give birth - either way we hope she (and her offspring) will do well in their new undisturbed home!

A Candoia Christmas!

2009-12-30T15:15:00.000-08:00

Santa brought 5 new additions! Our friend Peter had to leave Fiji, and as you cannot export these endemic species, has passed his group along to me.

We now have 2 large females (from Kadavu Island), 3 small males (from Viti Levu Island) and our original group of 2 small males and 1 small female (from Taveuni Island). Plus our extended family (with other enthusiasts) has another small male from Viti Levu, and a large female from Taveuni, so we have a pretty interesting group forming.

Although this is still a small sample, I am seeing different patterns from the three different islands, and I'm going to start recording and photographing this. For the moment here are a few snaps:

Our original males from Taveuni (Zigzag and diamond back patterns and speckled bellies)New males from Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji(Blotchy back patterns and a black belly stripe)New females from Kadavu (Blotchy back patterns and plain or speckled bellies)

The friendly twins!

2009-10-26T00:32:00.000-07:00

Mating!

2009-10-16T00:11:00.000-07:00

With some fear and trepidation we introduced our two VERY small males to the VERY large female, and of course nature provided all our fears unnecessary and within 30 minutes they were all in a big tangle and mating was going on.

Snakes have to be together for a long time: the females only ovulate after mating has started, and they still have to be fertilised after that, so we are leaving these guys together for the next 3 - 4 weeks.

If this is successful she will be pregnant for 9 months, so we have a long time to wait, but I hope we are at least on the way to our first breeding programme.

On first introduction the two small males stuck closely together. Candoia bibroni bibroni apparantly like to mate with more than one male if possible. These two are siblings from the same litter, so the genetics should be the same whichever one is sucessful.

One of the males explores the huge female
Tangled tails hopefully mean mission accomplished - or at least underway
After mating she retired to her bath: but he stayed all over her, still courting. The difference in head size is very obvious here, but size really did NOT seem to matter....

Huge female ready to breed

2009-10-08T21:38:00.000-07:00

After nursing our small males from new-borns to over 1 metre long and 4 years old, we want to start a breeding programme. Females get much larger than males, so we knew our under 1 metre female wasn't ready yet...

So Thomasina has come to stay! She belongs to a friend of ours who has been getting her into superb shape for the past 12 months, and now we think (hope) the time is right to introduce them. I'm a bit worried about the size disparity, but the experts tell us this is the way it works, so here we go....

Thomasina is twice as long and probably 4 times as heavy as Rifraf and Magenta, so either they are in for the time of their lives, or a completely traumatic experience. We'll keep recording!

Here's the gorgeous Thomasina, almost 2 metres long:In her bath before joining our snake tanks:
She's ready for her close-up Mr DeMille....

And our comparatively puny males, Magenta and Rifraf, hopefully up to the task....

Peter's lost snake returns!

2009-10-06T15:17:00.000-07:00

Just to prove that good things happen to he who waits...
This small male Fiji Boa escaped his tank over a year ago, and was thought lost. Then a month ago a small head was seen peering out of the rafters, and he was recaptured none the worse for wear. The advantages of keeping snakes in their natural environment! His young owner is very happy to have him back, and he has settled straight back into his enclosure, probably very happy not to have to keep an eye out for mongooses the whole time anymore!