Snake Spotlight: Madam Peppercake
- Enigma4you
- Dec 27, 2021
- 3 min read
This is the OG snake that started it all. I fell in love with this little noodle the moment I got her. She is a spicy girl that even now hisses while moving diagonally across her enclosure. This is just the way she is. She will hood up and hiss, not bluff striking, until she has been picked up. Then she is instantly calm. She is a little over a year old and is steadily growing.
She is a normal wild type Plains hognose (Sometimes known as a Western Hognose snake in the trade), and close to a pattern you might see in the wild. Her belly has a gorgeous mixture of golden yellows, browns and blacks, and the top is a brown with darker brown spots. Although the patterns on her are not particularly special for a normal, she does have a bit of a reddish tint to her, which suggests some purple or extreme red lines sometime distantly in her genes. She was not listed as either however. I got her from the reptile breeder Geckos Etc. I have had great experiences with them and their snakes, and highly recommend them to anyone. She is a normal type, but is also het for albino, so in the future we will be pairing her with an albino to get roughly about 1/2 albino babies from them, and half normal het albino. Any baby of Peppercake's is bound to be a sassy noodle.
She displays many typical hognose qualities, including her propensity for being a picky eater and being full of attitude. She was eating both thawed mice and reptilinks at some point, and then she just decided that she didn't like reptilinks anymore. She just never accepted them again, even if they were scented or left in her enclosure or anything else. So she's back on mice now and only mice. Maybe sometime in the future she will accept reptilinks again. Sometimes she likes having her meal from the tongs, and sometimes she hates when anyone is watching her and prefers to have the meal left in the enclosure.
You may be wondering about her name. Well, considering how often she flattens her head at us, we thought she looked a lot like a pancake. But her belly is so colorful and gorgeous, making me think of peppercorns. So we just merged the two into one, making Peppercake. Well, actually it's Madam Peppercake, but we shorten it to Peppercake. She is a quite the royalty, usually getting the best of everything.
We might dote on her quite a bit. She gets the best hides and decorations and gets held the most. She was the first to try out the paper towel rolls and get fake plants added to her enclosure. There is also a super fancy cave hide that no one else gets because only the best for our little princess. Unsurprisingly, she prefers hiding under the wood shavings or in the toilet paper rolls more than the expensive cave, but what can you do? She enjoys jamming as much of her body into as small of a tp roll as possible.
In fact, for anyone thinking of keeping hognoses in the future, I highly recommend using empty toilet paper or paper towel rolls as extra enrichment/hides for your snakes. They are easy to replace often and the snakes honestly love them. They still need proper large hides, but these are easy to throw in as supplementary.
Peppercake seems to love the attention, although she doesn't like to sit still. She is an explorer and will always be moving around, looking for a place to hide. I have to be careful not to lose her if I let her wander around. The dark area under my keyboard seems to be a favorite place for her to hide, but she's starting to get too big to fit there anymore. In fact, when I first got her, she was a mere 24 grams. Now she is pushing 90. She barely fits in my hand anymore. But even as she grows up, she continues to be just as adorable and sassy as the first day we got her.
I look forward to seeing this girl grow up to be a big adorable noodle mom one day, so that she can flat at me even more with her sassy face.
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