Hello i recently have purchased a male eastern milk snake from a seller on fb market place and the seller has has removed there account so i cant ask them for any help and i haven’t been able to get him to eat and its been a little over a month but he hasn’t lost any weight since i was able to start weighing him he weighs 86-96 grams (was hard to get a good read cause of him moving in the container) and he is 30 inches long. his warm side stays within 2 degrees of 80 and his cool side stays around 75 on the surface and 70 in his underground hide. humidity has been a steady 50% along with him having a humid hide option. he went into blue as soon as i got him home and i got a nice long complete shed in couple of days. so in conclusion im pretty sure some random guy caught this snake in his basement and sold it me tho it shows no signs of being wild ( hasn’t showed any defensive displays not even a tail shake) i haven’t been able to get him to respond to food I’ve tried braining and live pinkies besides normal frozen thawed. and now I’m starting to get worried cause its been a month and there’s very little info about keeping eastern milks.
Welcome! Those have a reputation for being tricky feeders. And I’ve picked up internally injured ones from roadsides that looked clean enough to be captive bred, so he could be W/C. With the days getting shorter, he may be preparing to brumate. At 90g he can handle much bigger prey than pinks. I’d try a small f/t mouse next, served hot. If that’s refused, I’d be considering brumation until days get noticeably longer in late February.
Hopefully people who know the species better than I do will chime in. Good luck!
thank you for your advise. i hope to be able to breed him next year or so if i can figure out this eating thing lol. but one of the things i saw was it could be brumation but after i did his second temp drop he started getting more active looking for ways out of his enclosure and was darting for the heat lamp every time it turned on so i figured it was abnormal for him to do this so i turned the temp back to 80 it was only at 70 when he started acting weird like that. and he went back to his normal low activity except during early morning and dusk. i have also noticed he lives on a schedule way better then i do he dose the exact same things every day at the same time. so I’ve tried to feed at the same time and handle same time on the days i handle him.
This time of year it’s likely shutting down and needing to be cooled. It should already be empty, so kill the lights and start dropping temps over a couple weeks. then keep him cool for a few months. Once it’s time to warm up, I strongly suggest reducing the light intensity and starting with live fuzzies
thats what i was thinking after i offered a brained hopper he showed more interest then he did with the pinkies but all he did was do a bunch of long flicks on it for a min or so then he went back to the cool side of his tank where he started spending most of his time buried mostly witch I’ve seen is normally a sign of brumation. so he’s down to 70s on the warm side and 60s for the cool side next step should be to remove his heat source cause the regulator doesn’t seem to want to go below 70s on its heat setting