Time management

I'm looking to hear from the breeders with experience. Once the babies have hatched out how do you manage your time if you have 5 or even 10+ clutches? Do you feed every 5 days whatever day of the week it falls on or do you feed every 7 days to keep a weekly schedule? How often do you check in on each individual baby for sheds, spilled water bowels, non eaten prey...etc?

:laugh: More than a few times the number of babies I had hatching out pushed me to the brink of a nervous breakdown. I remember one day standing in one room looking at all the egg hatching containers. I used color dots to indicate the status of the eggs inside. Red dots meant they had all hatched out and ready to be set up in individual containers and offered food. Anyway, that one day there were a LOT of containers with red dots and I remembered thinking that there was just no way possible I was going to get them all set up before they would just start dying on me. I was nearly overcome with the compulsion to open the door to the reptile building and just start running into the woods screaming. I don't think I would have stopped. But I got a hold of myself and just hunkered down and got it done, somehow.

At the peak of SerpenCo, my limiting factor was "how many one day old pinky mice can I get out of the mouse colony." I would have liked to be on a 5 day schedule, but often times that wasn't possible. I HAD to get the babies onto frozen pinkies as quickly as possible, one reason being that it was killing me with the time I had to spend in the mouse building just searching for those one day olds. I had to go through every mouse cage every day, and that took a couple of hours.

Sorry, I digress..... Or did I regress?

Shoot for a 5 day schedule. That seemed to work best for babies. If you drag it out to 12 days or more, they will die on you. Yeah, sometimes we were doing too many shows and there just wasn't enough time to go around.

Man I am glad to be out of that. I know Connie is too. It was very hard on both of us.

I started with doing the daily pinkie searches. I quickly realized that was a waste of time. Now as I'm cleaning the mouse rack I use a dry erase marker and just mark each tub with a slash for every female that looks to be giving birth soon. So on feeding days I just have to open and check tubs with the slash instead of all of them. If I remove pinkies from a tub I just wipe off a slash.

My normal weekly schedule is feeding and watering my balls on Saturdays. Then Sunday mornings everything else gets fed and water topped off. Mondays are rodent, quail and chicken cleaning days which takes a few hours. Tuesdays is typically yard work day and a break from animals. Wednesdays are spot cleaning cages and clean water bowls.

Daily feedings and watering of the chickens, rodents, and quail typically takes just under 30 mins. I do that before I go into normal mon-fri office job.

Rich Z said:

:laugh: More than a few times the number of babies I had hatching out pushed me to the brink of a nervous breakdown. I remember one day standing in one room looking at all the egg hatching containers. I used color dots to indicate the status of the eggs inside. Red dots meant they had all hatched out and ready to be set up in individual containers and offered food. Anyway, that one day there were a LOT of containers with red dots and I remembered thinking that there was just no way possible I was going to get them all set up before they would just start dying on me. I was nearly overcome with the compulsion to open the door to the reptile building and just start running into the woods screaming. I don't think I would have stopped. But I got a hold of myself and just hunkered down and got it done, somehow.

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Very funny! I thought opening the door and throwing the extra hatchlings outside. LOL. :laugh::laugh::laugh:

I feed on sunday. Always. When they shed on monday they have to wait until sunday for their first meal. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to get a regulary schedule to feed them between working, studying and keeping the house clean.

But I have only 16 cluches this year, so I have way less than Rich had in his worst seasons. I think I would do it different with that many hatchlings to feed since it wouldn't be possible to feed all in one day.

Regardless of whether they are 10 days old or 10 years old. Saturday I clean all Snake Tubs and Rodent Tubs. On Sunday I feed all the snakes. That's my routine.

Babies and small juveniles eat Monday, Friday, and then the following Wednesday on a repeating schedule. Females eat Mondays and during the breeding season get a slightly smaller meal on Fridays. Males eat every other Monday, though I will toss them extras during the season as well.

The "schedule" was to clean 10 baskets every night. Each held 32 deli cups. Then go through the mouse colony trying to harvest 320 day old pinkies. EVERY night. Unless we were at a show.

We had to cut down on the number of shows we did because that cut too far into the feeding schedule and the babies were suffering from being fed at too wide of a schedule. Target was every 5 days. But that would only cover 1600 babies. There were lots of times when I had a LOT more than that needing to be taken care of. One year I had 8,000+ babies hatch out. I about lost my marbles that year. So, that is when I started bulking out a lot of babies to wholesalers. Unless something was REAL special, in the bags they went to move them out. Otherwise I just would not have been able to get everything cared for. Every year the bar I considered for what was worth keeping to be fed and cared for, whether for future breeders or animals for sale got higher and higher. Once I got to the point where I could no longer even consider keeping normal colored project animals, I knew the writing was on the wall for considering retirement. I was soon going to be dead in the water for being able to produce new things.

Anyway, for a show weekend, it would put 12 days between feedings. If you go too many times of 10 days or longer, you will start losing babies, even if they are ready, willing, and able to feed.

It was quite the grind, to be honest.