Last night was feeding night. I pre-scented and removed the water bowl/hide, which has become our feeding routine. When I came back 1/2 hour later, she was appeared ready to eat, at least according to my best guess based on about a month of observation.

I dropped the mouse in, and at first it wandered away from the snake. She sat and waited. When the mouse eventually wandered in her direction, BOOM! she struck and constricted it. Then she mouthed it a little bit and let go. She nosed it a lot but didn't seem to be making an effort to try to eat it.

I got worried that she wasn't going to eat it when she left the dead mouse and started exploring her cage, still apparently in hunting mode, but not the same sit and wait to ambush it mode. I could see that she was obviously checking out the scent trail the mouse had left before it wandered close enough for her to strike.

She finally went back to the dead mouse, grabbed it, dragged it halfway across the cage, and started nosing it again with maybe a little mouthing it but mostly just using her nose with her mouth closed. She went through another round of exploring her cage before she came back to the dead mouse again and finally ate it.

Any ideas why she would do this? This is only the 3rd successful feeding we've had since we got her, but both of the other 2 she swallowed immediately after killing them.

I have 2 ideas. The first is that I could see that somehow in the constricting process, the mouse's head got tucked down towards its chest, so finding its nose was probably somewhat more challenging than normal.

The second is that maybe the mouse was bigger than she wanted? The pet store was out of hopper mice, which is what she has been eating, so we got a weanling. To my eyes, it was only slightly bigger than the one we fed a week ago. That one I think was probably a weanling also going by the definitions on rodentpro, altho the store called the one a week ago a hopper. She ate the one a week ago without any hesitation. This was one still smaller than her girth and once she actually got the nose in her mouth and started swallowing it didn't seem like she was having to struggle an exceptional amount to swallow it. It left a noticeable but not huge bulge once she had swallowed it.

Is this part of normal feeding behavior? A sign of trouble? Should I do anything about it?