Balls of Steele

[Thomas Steele]

Greetings all! I started keeping snakes back in college (back in '96) and at one point was up to 12 or 13. Most of them ball pythons. Normals with 3 males that were 66% het for albino but I never got a chance to breed them. I had a pair of dumerils boas, a burmese, a pair of blood pythons, briefly a carpet python that hated me, and a red tail boa that was an adoption from someone who couldn't keep him anymore. I also had a few leopard geckos that we successfully bred and hatched around 5 babies.

After college came marriage and kids and due to time constraints I had to divest myself of my reptiles. When my son was around 3 we got a normal male ball python and he's been with us ever since (about 9 years).

Now that my kids are older and with my wife's encouragement I'm back into the hobby with hopes to breed in a year or two. As cool as hatching the leopard geckos was I can't imagine the excitement a clutch of ball python eggs will bring.

We started out with getting a pair of Het Ultramels and then we picked up a male and female pastel lesser which we fell in love with at the Atlanta Repticon show. Or normal male actually led us back into things since we got him from Justin Kobylka all those years ago and at the time my son got a t-shirt from him. Now my youngest was wearing that same shirt and my wife googled Justin to see if he was still around and one thing lead to another and we were picking up a pair of Het Ultramels from him.

Introduction aside here's some pics. My wife took most of these using a white poster board in full sunset on our back porch.

First here's our normal male (Columbus) with my daughter (Aspen) for scale





And here are some shots of the female het ultramel with the female pastel lesser. I think all of the pastel lesser shots are of the female but I can't remember for sure.








And a little bit of a tongue flick caught in action:

[Stewart_Reptiles]

to the forum hope you enjoy your stay!

[DooLittle]

Welcome aboard!

[AlexisFitzy]

Welcome to the forum!! you've got some beautiful snakes in your collection.


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[Reinz]

Welcome to the Forum.

I just love how Aspen is fearless. And she seems to enjoy being on the floor with the snake.

Really cool!

[Thomas Steele]

I just love how Aspen is fearless. And she seems to enjoy being on the floor with the snake.

She's definitely my assistant snake keeper. I figured my boys would be but she shows far more interest in the snakes and helping me out than they do so far.

[SlitherinSisters]

Welcome to the site! You have some good looking snakes!

[Thomas Steele]

Today is Francis' birthday so I thought I'd post some 1 year picks of him taken this morning. He's 615g today.



He's a pretty defensive guy. He'll typically take a strike or two and then ball up when he realizes you're not going away. He's actually started to mellow a bit this last month so hopefully that trend continues.