My Baby ball python is curled up into a ball outside his hide?

[gplegend11]

That's sounds fine ... how are you actually reading the temps though ? What are you using ?

Make sure you are measuring the actual ground under the hide and not just the air temp. Use a infrared temp gun if you haven't been using one to measure that. I have a probe thermometer under the substrate in my warm side hide to constantly take peeks at somewhat relative temperature, but the temp gun will for sure give you correct readings.i got a very nice one at Home Depot for darn cheap.

also, one of my new ones pretty much did that for a couple weeks. She is very young and I didn't know near as much as I do now(thanks to the ballers and shot callers on this forum), so I put her in a 20 gallon enclosure. I filled the bottom with hides of all sorts so there wouldn't be as much empty space but she would wonder every single inch all the time, followed by short bouts of hide usage. She wouldn't eat either. She would push herself up by her tail against the sides so high towards the top that she would fall to the side and body slam the ground over and over and over... seriously. I thought I had a partially mentally handicapped snake... lol.

anyways, I balled up like ten pieces of paper and laid them in there and then took pieces of cardboard that I slightly bent and laid them over each other to cover everything. It essentially was an inside cover over all the hides and waded paper, so that instead of nothing but empty space over her, she had a cover 1 inch over her head and literally zero empty space on the ground. Enough stuff on the ground that if she wanted to move somewhere she couldn't without having to slither through a bunch of different crap and had something right over her head.

She of course could have came outside of the "fort" if she wanted to, but literally the second I did that she stopped wandering her cage and ate at her very next feeding. 3rd consecutive successful feeding since then just yesterday.

1- temp gun readings under warm side hide
2- zero empty space(this is what made the difference for me. Night and day)

Oh also make sure his/her hide is just a tiny bit bigger than they are when loosely curled up and very short as well