Observations on the 2nd feeding

[erinisnice]

It ended well, but the beginning was a little rough. At the store a couple blocks away that sells feeder mice/rats, they were completely out of fuzzy rats, so I got a similar sized adult mouse.

At home I put Flannery in the rubbermaid bin I'm using for feeding (I am part of another bp group that unanimously recommends a seperate place to feed and I am so glad I got one. The mouse made a mess, and I didn't have to dig through the cage to clean it up. Also, it would be much easier to quickly intervene if I had to. And the snake and food have nowhere to hide, so it goes quickly)

So for the first couple minutes, the snake was completely ignoring the mouse. She didn't even know it was there until it annoyed her by crawling on the tip of her tail. She killed it very quickly then, and barely had to coil around it.
Then the strange thing happened-- She tried to eat it tail first. After a few minutes she gave up.
Then she just crawled all around it doing a very strange thing I've seen her do before:
She kind of rubs her nose around back and forth like she is sniffing, but she doesn't flick her tongue in and out.
Is she smelling when she does this? I thought snakes couldn't smell without using their tongues? She does this to my hands too sometimes, and it is confusing.
So she "sniffs" like this all over the dead mouse for about 10 minutes, and then finally decides to swallow it head first. I was so worried she wasn't going to eat it!
Sorry this was so long!

[Boarder4l154]

I've seen this "sniffing" you're talking about with my bp's. Most of the time my snakes have a nice and smooth stirke, most of the time they aim for the head, and thus already have the mouse's head in their mouth after they're done coiling it. Sometimes, this doesn't happen, this is when i see them "sniff". To be honest I'm not exactly sure if they use their tongues exclusivly for smelling, they do have nostrils. but I could be completely wrong about that. as for the sniffing, my guess would be that that is their way of getting a precise heat reading on the prey so they can find the head and gobble up!