Hi everyone. I spent some time looking for a good reptile/bp community and I'm happy to be here. A little about me... I'm a 27 year old guy who has an all-around love for animals. When I was younger I had wanted a snake, but my parents never let me. Now that I'm older and wiser, I felt it was a good time to finally fulfill that wish and become caretaker to one of these beautiful creatures. I'm brand new to caring for a snake, although I had a friend with a veritable menagerie back in college. I'm just trying my best not to harm the poor guy out of my own mistakes and lack of experience!

First of all, Monty (overused, perhaps, but I'm a huge Monty Python fan ) was captive bred in '08, but I'm not exactly sure what month. I'd estimate he's about 16" long, though. Here he is before I brought him home:



Now, seeing as how I'm a complete newbie to caring for snakes (and reptiles in general, beyond a turtle in middle school), I had a few questions that have been bugging me. I hope someone far more experienced can help me out. First of all, I know that moving my BP to a new home and habitat is stressful, so I'm willing to chalk most of this up to stress seeing as how he just came home with me yesterday afternoon, but like a nervous dad I just like to be sure. We have a local specialty snake shop which set me up with a snake kit: a 10 gallon tank with a screen lid and clips, a 10-20 zoo med UTH, aspen bedding, a water bowl/rock, and a small half log. On top of this, I bought a piece of wood to aid shedding, two aquarium stick on type thermometers (stupid of me, i now realize; i'm going to get better ones this weekend), a hygrometer, a zoo med 20" hood with two incandescent and 1 fluorescent fixture, a 40 watt red heat bulb, a 60 watt day bulb, and a plastic plant.

I live in Miami so the humidity in the vivarium is always between 50-60% without needing to do anything special. My household temperature is generally 74-76F. When I first brought Monty home, I placed him in the vivarium and he was pretty much cruising around the perimeter, trying to scale up the sides, and was pretty well active until the UTH started to finally heat up, at which time he plopped himself down on that side and he has pretty much stayed there for the last 24+ hours. I have yet to see him on the "cool" side. Is this pretty much normal? With the day bulb on, the crappy stick on thermometers show about 85F ambient on the 'warm side' and about 80-82F ambient on the 'cool side', although I'm sure the belly temperature is less on that side (I need to buy myself an infrared thermometer this weekend). With the red light it's a bit less, but not by too much. If I don't have either light on, however, the ambient drops to the upper 70s.

For the most part, he's usually under the half log on the UTH side, but sometimes he'll climb out and sit between the glass and the top of the half log. Still, he just never leaves that area, as far as I have seen. Here's how I found him pretty much all afternoon:



It almost seems as though he's balled up in the stressed out, defensive position or something



I have made some changes to the habitat since I took this photo. I removed the large plant and the water dish because I felt they were too large for the 10 gallon tank and were overcrowding things. I replaced the large dish on the right side with a smaller zoo med corner dish and placed a new small rock cave hide on that side towards the front so that he has a choice of hides on warm and cool side. I'm hoping that might help out a bit.

Of course, it's also possible that he's just stressed out, right? Realistically, aside from switching the lights on and off for the day/night 12hr cycles, should I pretty much avoid even going near the vivarium for a week or so? I almost worry that me walking over to take a look at him might be too much stress.

Essentially, I want to make sure I'm not screwing anything up too royally until I manage to put together the awesome set up that was stickied at the top of the forum. Even then, I may want to wait a while since moving him from one habitat to another *twice* in a week might be too much stress.

Addendum: I was working on this post little by little throughout the night and as of now, 9:49pm, Monty came out of his hide and is climbing up the side of the tank (on the warm side) and seems to be checking things out. Perhaps making things less "busy" was for the better?

Thanks for your time and for reading the ramblings of a newbie!