THANK YOU JP... AND... my sincere apologies...
for not keeping some of you updated on what happened to the "golden" project. My life has been quite busy and most of it has been spent overseas. I am once again (for the last time), finding myself going overseas. I do have two older sons that will assist me in caring for my animals while I do my last tour overseas (Iraq/Afghanistan) and then come home for good. I only recently returned from Afghanistan (this summer), so I have only been home for about two months.
This year has been a BAD YEAR for ME (and the golden corns):
I had asked my son to breed the four female hets and the original golden female with the male hets. All of the cages were well marked. My son accidentally mixed up two of the hets when he was cleaning their cages, which also resulted in getting two more hets getting placed in the wrong cages. When he pulled them out in April and paired all the golden hets, all he really paired correctly was ONE PAIR!!! The other four cages had: two males in two cages, and two females in the other two cages. When I came home early in the summer I noticed that he only paired ONE PAIR properly. So I got seven good eggs out of only one female(het), and they DID hatch recently with dissapointing results: All hatched but one got stuck in the egg and died due to a kink in its' spine. The only golden corn out of those seven eggs was the one that died in the egg... The other six are doing fine, but are all hets...
I WAS NOT HAPPY WITH MY SON...
So THIS time I WILL try to come home in APRIL for a short vacation so I can ensure that all of the golden corn hets will be paired up properly!!! If for some reason I cannot make it home I have promised my son $500 bonus IF he pairs up all my corns PROPERLY and I get FIVE batches of golden het eggs!!! My son is a good man and I trust he WILL do the right thing this time.
I currently still have the original golden corn mom & two juvenile golden corns that are a little over two feet long and are doing great (one male & one female). And of course twelve older hets - four females and eight males that are all at least three feet long and ready to go for next year...
I strongly believe that by next (late) summer I WILL be able to start selling a few golden corns for the first time ever AND some hets...
Once again please accept my apologies and THANK you JP for the wake-up call... I am currently out of state but will return home for a weekend and take some more updated pics of the young and the mother golden corn and post them here next week.
BTW: The original golden corn WAS found by myself and my son in late September 2004, in Cumberland county, North Carolina (not South Carolina) while cruising the back roads in hopes of finding a male corn snake for my sons' pet female corn. So if hadn't been for my son I would have never went out that day....
(Here's a recent outdoor pic of the golden corn momma that I took about a month ago. She's just over four foot and her colors have faded a little. I guess she's getting old/er. I don't know her exact age since I found her as an adult in the wild)
THANK YOU for your patience, AND understanding (I hope),
Carsten "ZEE" Zoldy