I've recently rescued a juvenile red tail boah. His owner left for college and the parents were feeding it only once a month. He's eating healthy now and he's pretty small so I still have him on mice. As he grows I'll transition him to coturinx since they can't hurt him (rats and rabbits can bite and scratch snakes) and I know they are parasite and disease free. My question is, has anyone developed a hatching program to keep sufficient birds of different sizes for snake or falcon feeding?
Oh how cool! You might post in our Other Pets and Livestock section here on BYC. There are probably lots of snake owners over there. I know that you can buy frozen day old quail for feeding snakes and falcons. I have seen them in Falconry catalogs. So you might start doing a lot of hatching and freezing day old chicks.
It is possible if you get a system going. You would just have to have enough pairs to keep the incubator full. They take about 17 days to hatch so you would have to have atleast 17 in there every 17 days if you were to feed him a baby quail every day ( don't think you would). You would probably be good with 5-10 hens but would never hurt to do more and have the extra in the freezer. I'm going to start feeding my monitor lizard day old quail or maybe a little older once I have my first hatch breading
Good idea. I'll have to check over there. As he grows my concern is trying to figure out his feed program without having to raise a bunch of extras. He will only ever eat about once a week although now while he's young he eats about every 5 days. I may have to switch him to frozen birds if I can't make it work out easily with live ones. My flock never dips below 26 hens and is usually over 30 so that won't be an issue. Also he only eats every 5 days right now but in 6-8 months will only be eating once a week. I was thinking to allocate one row in each turning rack to continued hatching for the snake since I can turn 240 eggs at a time I won't miss 20 slots if they're busy with snake food. I was thinking to try to keep 5-7 eggs set every week and build a split up brooder to raise up 4 stages of chicks all different ages that way I can have at least 2-3 live birds each at 1 week, 2 weeks, 3weeks, 4 weeks at all times. When he's grown a 4-5 week old quail willl be perfect once a week. What I don't want to happen is to have a bad hatch week or whatever and end up feeding him one of my production birds that week so i'll also have to figure out how many extras to keep/I feel like feeding.
May be a good thing to do is once you geet a feeding program and once he gets older just keep like 10-20 weeks of food in the incubator and once you get low or to like 5 birds in the freezer throw some mre in the incubator. you can also feed her hard boiled eggs, migh take time for her to get use to it. i feed my two lizards and use to feed corn snake hard boiled eggs and they loved them
Now that you have the snake what are you feeding? Mice? Rats? Live? Pre-killed? Frozen/thawed? I recommend transitioning him to frozen/thawed as soon as he will accept it. You will not ever have to worry about him being bitten by his prey again. I've got a very old ball python I rescued and she had been bitten by her prey at one time because she still has the bite scars on her head and neck. This snake has a very hard time shedding with every shed so I have to manually help her shed, or at least start her sheds and she can finish once the old skin is past the scars. She is very imprinted on her current prey items (african soft furred mice) and will not take other prey items but at least has transitioned to pre-killed so she won't get injured again. Your snake looks young and being a boa will be easier than a ball python (notorious for imprinting on only one kind of prey) to transition to accept other prey items. Once he will accept quail as a meal you can go from feeding live to pre-killed to frozen/thawed. Feeding prey that has been previously frozen will solve a lot of your problems because you can raise a good number of meals for him and keep them in the freezer until he is ready for his next meal, then just thaw, warm to body temperature and feed. You don't have to worry about when you have have live quail available because he will have many meals lined up, and the frozen ones don't eat, make noise or poop!
He is currently eating live mice because he is a great waster of frozen mice. I've been...You know what I'm going to send you a PM....
I have a grown rubber boa, and she can only eat pinky mice because it's their natural diet, I wanted to have her eat day old coturnix, but she won't at all
I used to own several different breeds of snake, and I never had a problem feeding frozen anything, as long as it was warmed up completely. I would drop them in and tap the glass. After a couple times, they'd learned tapping meant time to eat.
You know when I got this thing I never though feeding a predator would be anything but easy...Sill pointed out that I may be feeding him the wrong thing. I'm not exactly sure what they were feeding him before and if i'm giving him mice, but they were giving him pinkies or somesuch difference that might explain his hesitance. I also haven't tried to skip a feeding on him yet since he wasn't being fed well before, I wanted to get him in good health before I do that.
