Two things i wish i knew.

Two things i've learned in the past month or so owning my first BP.

This is an underweight female who ate the first week and third week but not any-other time in the past 6-8 weeks or so.

#1. Baby/young balls often do not eat Frozen/Thawed as they lack the drive to eat something that isn't entertaining to them per say. Offering a fuzzy live rather than a f/t fuzzy or hopper got my BP eating, and now i can focus on getting her eating regularly and going then to f/t.

#2. Dangling a F/t by hand confuses and misleads the snake often times; they will pick up the heat from your and and the position of the food hanging is un-natural.



Wish someone slapped me a few weeks ago and told me that!!!

I tried upping temps, cluttering the terrarium, covering the sides, and even scenting the food with both tuna and beef.



Hope this helps someone!

I didn't have a problem at all offering F/T by grasping it by the tail to my first boy when he was only 100 grams. Sounds like an issue with your husbandry causing your snake to refuse. How are you measuring your temps? How are you regulating your heat sources? How big and how many hides are you providing? Scenting with tuna or beef? Where did you hear that?

Scenting is generally reserved for other types of snakes, unless you are scenting a rat with mouse bedding.

I agree double check your husbandry, but really that may not be the problem. Just follow the established ranges for temps and make sure you have enough identical hides.

BPs can be finicky eaters. You may well have to use live for a while and switch to F/T.

I have a couple of BPs that are such voracious eaters they lunge out of the rack as soon as open it on feeding day, others that require complete dark and silence, and one die hard mouser. So, figure out what your BP likes and go with it.

I always use forceps to offer f/t, so I am not sure about the hand thing. But, when I had a boa, I always fed her by hand and never once had a problem.

Right now, as i walk in the room the

hot spot is set for 95 with a UTH on a tstat and a probe between it and the glass, which leaves a heat gun reading of 91.
Ambient temp set to 86 with two night heat bulbs controlled by a tstat with probe about 2 inches from floor.
heat gun on floor is 83-89 (89 directly under heat bulbs)
Also a temp/humidity gauge 2 inches from floor reading 51% humidity and 86.9deg atm (again, a little off when the heat lamps kick on)

Are you using the round analog gauges for your ambients and humidity? If so, ditch them, they're horribly inaccurate. 86 is too warm for an ambient, you want 78-82. What about your hides? I'm assuming you have a hatchling so if so you don't want hides any larger than a cereal bowl. And you need at least two.

Most of my babies start on frozen thawed.

Its an electronic/digital thermo/hydrom i am using for monitoring the temps

also two hides, cool hide is a bit too big warm hide seems good size

Get two identical cereal bowls to use as hides, and drop your ambients. There's no reason a hatchling should be refusing to eat if everything is right. I don't think I would be far off in saying that >90% of the time a hatchling is off feed, it's due to incorrect husbandry.