Shramana
New member
Hey everyone! My name is Cam I'm a guy a little over a year out of college, and I just got a new Blizzard corn on Monday. He was an impulse purchase at Petsmart. I had originally gone to get a cat, but one of my roommates informed me he was allergic via text message when I was driving there, so I had to find something else. Though the purchase was a spontaneous one, Shady (as in Slim Shady) immediately became a very important part of my life. Whilst doing research, I stumbled across this website when researching my new friend and it has been an invaluable source of information. Seeing as I want to be an involved and good snake owner, I decided to join the community. In less than a week I have gone from not even thinking about snakes at all, to being unable to stop reading about corn snakes, and watching videos of corn snakes. Seriously, I'm into it man, way into it!
Shady seems to be acclimating well to his new home. When I picked him up, I purchased a Zilla-brand reptile starter kit, with at 20-gallon tank, substrate, hide, water dish, and heat lamps. For the first 3 days, he didn't come out from under the water dish, which was made to look like a rock and had a large space underneath it. He would wrap himself around the lip of the dish's base and stay in it even when I picked it up to change his water! He had had plastic plants in his viv at the pet store, so I went back and bought some forest-y decorations, as well as a new water dish he couldn't hang onto (i didn't want to keep having to remove him from a safe location and stressing him out). As soon as I put the new decor in, he became much less nervous, and crawled all around exploring and smelling everywhere for about an hour (at a relaxed pace, I don't think he was freaking out or anything) he climbed on all his climbing stuff. After reading this site early on, i soon discovered the lamps were the wrong heat source for a corn, and my UTH and hydrofarm thermostat (as recommended so often on this site) arrived and were installed yesterday. He seems even more comfortable without the heat lamp beaming in his face all the time. He's not super-shy, I think he just naps a lot. If you hover over his viv, he might slowly crawl into one of his hides. I think this might be because his viv in the pet store was elevated to about eye-level, and so he associates people over his viv with being held by strangers. However, if you sit and look through the side of the viv he doesn't seem bothered at all. If he starts coming out of his hide and someone stands over his viv, he sometimes retracts into his hide very slowly and uniformly without changing the shape of the part of the body that's exposed, you can almost hear the slide-whistle sound effect.
Anyway, enough talking, here's some showing:
Here's Shady wrapped around his palm frond, he loves climbing through it, and he slept like this for several hours on this occasion. I think he looks like a little wad of gum.
And here's his Viv. The starter kit I got just came with the substrate, the old dish, and the rock hide in the back right corner. It left way too much open space in the 20gallon, so I filled it in a bit for him. The sticky-thermometer in the back right is just being used to keep track of the humidity, the wires for the probes for the thermostat and thermometer can be seen on the left.
Anyway, just excited and wanted to share. Thanks for the indulgence, I hope to get to know everyone better and am very happy to find such a great site and community!
Shady seems to be acclimating well to his new home. When I picked him up, I purchased a Zilla-brand reptile starter kit, with at 20-gallon tank, substrate, hide, water dish, and heat lamps. For the first 3 days, he didn't come out from under the water dish, which was made to look like a rock and had a large space underneath it. He would wrap himself around the lip of the dish's base and stay in it even when I picked it up to change his water! He had had plastic plants in his viv at the pet store, so I went back and bought some forest-y decorations, as well as a new water dish he couldn't hang onto (i didn't want to keep having to remove him from a safe location and stressing him out). As soon as I put the new decor in, he became much less nervous, and crawled all around exploring and smelling everywhere for about an hour (at a relaxed pace, I don't think he was freaking out or anything) he climbed on all his climbing stuff. After reading this site early on, i soon discovered the lamps were the wrong heat source for a corn, and my UTH and hydrofarm thermostat (as recommended so often on this site) arrived and were installed yesterday. He seems even more comfortable without the heat lamp beaming in his face all the time. He's not super-shy, I think he just naps a lot. If you hover over his viv, he might slowly crawl into one of his hides. I think this might be because his viv in the pet store was elevated to about eye-level, and so he associates people over his viv with being held by strangers. However, if you sit and look through the side of the viv he doesn't seem bothered at all. If he starts coming out of his hide and someone stands over his viv, he sometimes retracts into his hide very slowly and uniformly without changing the shape of the part of the body that's exposed, you can almost hear the slide-whistle sound effect.
Anyway, enough talking, here's some showing:
Here's Shady wrapped around his palm frond, he loves climbing through it, and he slept like this for several hours on this occasion. I think he looks like a little wad of gum.
And here's his Viv. The starter kit I got just came with the substrate, the old dish, and the rock hide in the back right corner. It left way too much open space in the 20gallon, so I filled it in a bit for him. The sticky-thermometer in the back right is just being used to keep track of the humidity, the wires for the probes for the thermostat and thermometer can be seen on the left.
Anyway, just excited and wanted to share. Thanks for the indulgence, I hope to get to know everyone better and am very happy to find such a great site and community!
