Caught a wild garter!

[Calift]

Okay...I took other ones before as well....they are uploading now.

[Calift]

Could it be possible that she already delivered babies? I noticed yesterday a smaller garter in the same location....though it appeared to be at least a few weeks old.

[Calift]

[RichsBallPythons]

way i got my garters when i kept them off worms and fish was scenting the mice with a worm and that got them eating 100% all the time. i slowly used less worm scent on the mice till the point of no scent.

I once in a while gave them fresh fish fillets from the market when i was making fish. But if you can get them on mice from scenting stick with that and youll be well on your way.

Heres a video of a gravid female i had who only ate mice.

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/ca...5904353wx8mR3d

[aSnakeLovinBabe]

Well, it's still hard to tell in the pictures, but you definitely have a young adult by the look of your $5 bill. Ideally, you would feed your WC garter a varied diet, sticking more to what they would eat naturally and including mice as well. I use about 50% fish based foods, 20% worms and 30% rodents. I find that too many rodents makes for a fat, slow garter snake. Garter snakes do not regularly prey on rodents in the wild, but as a part of a varied diet they are great to use!!! I don't recommend feeding all of one food item no matter what it is, but especially rodents, they are very rich and fatty compared to what these snakes normally eat!

[Calift]

Ok...thanks for the information. I will definitely keep the varied diet in mind if I keep him/her long enough to feed. I've been thinking about an elaborate tank already, but I'll never be able to recreate a live bush in an aquarium...lol.


What would make the pictures better? No background junk and a flat bill? I have a digital scale too that I could try using too.


Aww well I'm already in love with this one...garters are such neat snakes!

[Calift]

Oh and I wanted to ask, you can tell the gender based on their morphology?

[aSnakeLovinBabe]

Garter snakes are very sexually dimorphic as adults. 99 % of the time I can accurately sex an adult garter snake before I have even picked it up. Females are bulky, they get much larger than males, they usually have a wider, bigger head, chunky body, Really big, exaggerated upper labial scales, are usually gravid when found in mid-summer, and have a petite tail that ends rather abruptly. Males are small and petite, They usually have little heads and a narrow look to their face, and even well fed males tend to stay slender even when compared to a non gravid female of the same length. Their tail is basically a dead giveaway, it is much longer and thicker at the base and continues to be thick for sometime before it tapers off. They don't require nearly as much food as a female and usually aren't quite as voracious as the ladies.

A good shot to tell us if she's gravid would be from above of just the snake with nothing hiding any part of her body. The bill is not necessary as I have a pretty good idea of her size based on her head shape

[aSnakeLovinBabe]

I just realized that you have a very clear view of the tail in the second to last picture. Definitely a girl

[aSnakeLovinBabe]

Could it be possible that she already delivered babies? I noticed yesterday a smaller garter in the same location....though it appeared to be at least a few weeks old.

a neonatal garter is tiny... REALLY TINY!! Easterns tend to have large amounts of small babies, the ones born around here usually measure 4-5 inches in length when all the way stretched out!

If she has recently delivered babies (within a few days), she would look rather thin and may have folds in the skin of the back half of her body. That one definitely has not delivered any babies lately... she looks like a lil' chunker!