Leia - My First Snake

Leia at about 12 month old

Princess Leia is a Stimson Python, Sintific name Liasis stimsoni and sometimes known as a Large Blotched Python. Leia was the first snake I purchased back in 2006. I picked this snake for several reasons. Stimson’s are renowned as a quiet and placid bread of snake and they also only grow up to about 1 – 1.2 meters. At the time I thought that this would be a very manageable snake for my first snake. She has proven to be both a nice size and placid snake. In fact she is the only snake that I will offer to visitors to hold if they are interested. She has only bitten me once and that was when I did something pretty stupid. I waved my thumb in front of her mouth without realising. She took one look at it and thought DINNER TIME. Before I knew it she had latched on to my thumb but very quickly realised that she had bitten off more than she could chew, or swallow for that matter, so she let go.

 
I picked her up as a 6 month old baby. She was tiny only a little bit thicker than a pencil and about 25-30cm long. She seemed so delicate at the time and that was a good thing because she was my first snake. I thought that I had lost her about 6 weeks after I got her when she got behind the back ground in her cage it took me about 40 minutes of searching before I found her and then another 20 minutes to try and get her out.

 
She is in a 3ft x 1.5ft x 1.5ft enclosure with a flower pot for a hide. She loves her flower pot and spends most of her day hiding in it. She comes out most nights and it is not uncommon to find her up on her rock warming up under her heat lamp first thing in the morning.

Hiding under my rock