if you love ssssomething, sssset it free!

as you probably learned from meemer's blog, harry caught a snake, fondly named "reggie" who was living in our aquarium. a day or two later, reggie had new tank-mates. aside from the fact that our aquarium was too small for a snake that size, (let alone 3) we couldn't figure out what to feed reggie, freddy, and stumpy.


meemer looked online, and found suggestions of worms, slugs, or small fish. harry and chilly happily took to worm-hunting. there were soon several worms per snake. maybe too many. we had no way of knowing if the snakes ever ate any! we never saw them show any interest anyway. so one day, we stopped by the pet store to ask advice. we were told quite positively that they would eat goldfish. "just put them in the water dish." can you see goldy floating in the water in the above picture?

so the snakes have slithered through the water, right past the goldfish, again showing no interest. they ignored the fish that died in the bowl, so i left it on the land in their tank to see if they would go for that. there was a third fish, swimming in the standing water under the rock where the snakes like to spend time. still nothing.

so last night, (remember what i felt like based on my previous post) harry and i came down to find one of the snakes on the lamp housing, and a second one part-way out of the door! they had managed to push themselves up, and lift the lid! the one was easy. i opened the lid, and gave him a nudge, and he dropped back down into the tank. the second one, fell off the tank and in the struggle to capture him he then dropped to the floor. About 2/3 of him was into a hole under our kitchen island, before i grabbed his tail, and pulled him back out. harry grabbed him, and we got him back home just as mom walked in...

today, after weighing chilly's request for a home for his fish (at least the 2 surviving goldfish) with harry's fondness for his "pets," i decided, (bearing in mind the first escape noted in meemer's blog, and the second one noted here) that we should free them. i asked harry, and since we didn't know if they had eaten anything, and we didn't want them to die, he agreed to free them.


so on a beautiful fall day, harry took each snake out, and carefully put it back, just where he had found it a few days earlier. chilly kept the dog at bay, and we got some video and some pictures of them slithering away, to remember the brief time when we had snakes.


oddly enough, when i cleaned out the aquarium, i could only find 2 fish...