Your western diamondback is beautiful. Is it a boy or girl and did you name him/her?
The only way I know how to tell at 1st glance if its an eastern or western diamondback is to look for the black+white bands near the rattle. If there its western if not eastern. I think if memory serves easterns are also a bit more chonky and bigger.
They’re in snap top quarantine tubs with the edges taped in a coat closet that’s escape proof, for another couple months
I have one of my carpenters building 2’x4’ slide front boxes with locking glass and I plan to set them up pretty naturalistic so I’ll definitely do a post once they’re built.
I didn’t plan this snake or the one that came with it. They were listed on CL by someone who promotes free handling. I felt responsible for taking them out of circulation since I work with buzzers a lot doing relocations.
Something with manageable size and normal body language. Ordinarily a CBB northern pacific or speckled is a good place to start. Both can have calm demeanors and stay under 3-3.5’.
This WDB thinks it’s a ball python from being free handled and it has a confidence level similar to a BCI. Pushes stuff with it’s head and all. It seeks you out incessantly so it’s constantly trying to climb the hook to get on your arm. Which isn’t allowed so it’s more double hook juggling working with him. Westerns also get bigger than most people are going to be confident working with at 5-6’. At that size the venom load if you take a wet bite is a real concern.
The Northern Pacific has a couple of spinal kinks that make it’s body language completely unreadable. If it gets jumpy the kinks seem to bother it and it becomes a real wild card and starts pin-balling around. I often crawl under trailer houses and drag terrified Northern Pacific’s out after they’ve harassed by cats, dogs, or garden hoses and they’re still 100% more predictable than this one is.
Edit to add: First thing this snake is doing around here is going on a diet. This what an obese rattlesnake looks like.
So it’s been a hot minute since I posted here, but I did add a few more hoggies off MorphMarket as well as a bloodred piedsided corn snake from the Super Reptile Show in Anahiem. Hard to find a nice one these days, but I got lucky!
At least it makes sure people will be properly educated. Not sure if I need to have a mentor here in Indy though. Not sure if they have hours training with the species either.