Moose

1999

Cuddles

1999

Snuggles

2020

Wiggles

2020

In the late 1990s when I was getting into the adult phase of my reptile keeping I met friends nearby who shared my reptile keeping passion, and after a couple years of talking about it we went to our first big reptile show in San Diego California in the summer of 2000. It was quite the road trip. Obviously we talked reptiles for the entire 12 hour drive down and back, and while we were there we saw animals I had never seen before in real life. Of course, I couldn't make such a long trip and come home empty-handed so I picked up a pair of blood pythons and a pair of Dumerils boas.

The Dumerils impressed me because they had an intricate, high-contrast pattern that looked like nothing I had ever seen.

2020 litter of Dumeril's boas

It's funny that by the mid 2000's I had lost track of which Dumeril's was the male and which was the female. I paired the two together for my first attempt at breeding them in 2007 and when the babies were born, both parents were still in the cage. So I still didn't know which was which. Finally, they bred again in 2010 and the babies were born when the parents were separated. I made sure to do a better job keeping track after that.

2020, escapee baby that I found in a notebook on my shelf

Another funny thing with my Dumeril's is that when I kept them in cages with sliding glass doors the doors weren't always closed tightly the night when babies were being born, so sometimes I'd come in and there would be a few babies in the cage with mom, and then signs on the floor that there were more babies roaming around. We've had to do full searches of our basement trying to see what we can find. One time I found a baby when I pulled a notebook down from a shelf and opened it up and there was a baby in between the rings.