New owner questions

[Therealjonsmith]

We recently purchased a baby female ball python.

-How frequently should they poop? We’ve had her for 2 weeks, she has eaten a total of 6 mice in that time (4 fuzzies and 2 of the next size up), and I can tell her tail is thicker at the end from it so I feel like she should poop soon? We gave her a short soak in a little warm water last night. My husband thinks she was a little underweight when we got her (Petsmart, sigh) so I wonder if that’s partly why?

-Is it normal for them to roam their enclosure at night after handling? She is very content when we hold her so she sits with my husband for about an hour. Afterwards we find she roams around her enclosure (40 gallon but has 3 hides, 2 large sticks and a plant as well as 2 water dishes so not super open). She will go to the top (almost like she wants out) as well as up and down her sticks, but it’s slow calm movements. The only time she does this is late evening (10ish) after she’s been out (she stays in hides all day).

[GoingPostal]

Congrats on your new addition! For new snakes and especially baby ones, it's recommend to not handle right away and to wait until they've had several consecutive successful feedings. It's also best to feed only one appropriately sized prey item at a time, 5-7 days apart at that age and going to 10-14 days or longer as they reach adulthood. It's pretty stressful on them to be soaked so I wouldn't do that unless absolutely necessary and it almost never is with good husbandry. If she is underweight, she'll catch up just fine on regular meals, it's much harder on their systems to be fed too large or too frequent meals and obesity is easy to achieve and very hard to get rid of in snakes. Roaming at night or early morning is very normal.

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link to feeding chart below

https://ball-pythons.net/forums/show...ing-Guidelines