A Corn Snake Named Pumpkin
Pumpkin is our corn snake! We adopted her in 2011 when she was as thin as a pencil and only a couple of feet long. Her previous owners had over thirty snakes and didn’t want her anymore. Over time she grew into a very healthy six-foot snake with a hearty appetite.
Habitat
Pumpkin lives in a 120 gallon aquarium that we converted into a terrarium. She has aspen wood shavings for the substrate which she loves because it allows her to tunnel underneath. She also has vines and logs to slither on. We keep a heat lamp and a heat panel on one side of her tank to keep her warm. The other side without the heat stays cooler so she can choose which side she wants to be in. She spends most of her time in her underground tunnel right in the middle of the tank and comes out to hunt when she’s hungry.
Feeding
For the first two years we had Pumpkin we tried at every feeding time to switch her from eating live mice and rats to frozen mice and rats. She refused to eat every time we tried. During one feeding, her rat bit her and she wanted nothing to do with live food again. So from that point on, she’s been eating frozen rats. I’m much happier feeding her frozen rats. The sight and sound of her hunting and killing the live ones brought me to tears on more than one occasion.
Willy
We kept the rat that bit Pumpkin and named her Willy. We tried to tame Willy, but we never could. She was a feisty girl and if we got too close to her habitat, she would reach through the bars and try to grab us to pull us in. She ended up living for over a year in a nice habitat with toys and good food and treats!
A Sad Update
Pumpkin crossed Rainbow Bridge on February 27, 2020.
