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Adrya · #1 (**permalink**) 05-20-2007, 08:21 PM

I was about to go take a nap (didn't sleep well last night), but instead I decided to take a heap of newspapers I had to my herp building, and also I had a feeling that I needed to check on Sahira.

Sure enough to my surprise, when I looked, there were already two or three babies born, so I grabbed my camera that was sitting nearby, and I sat and took lots of pics! I was so excited I could hardly breathe, I had such a huuuuge smile on my face! She started having them at around 1pm today.

Father Goliath is a Colombian, grey/silver with lots of speckling and dark black saddles (gives the babies their grey/silver color). Short stripe saddle before the tail begins.

Mother Sahira is Colombian, I believe possibly a pastel(most of the babies have clean sides and lack of black pigment in the [brown] saddles), with a nice red tail (as you can see most of the babies have the nice red tails!) And seems many of them have light pink on them too.

Two of them as far as I know have a nice stripe... I don't know if that would be genetic... I think maybe temperature may have had something to do with it, as there were one or two days where it got warmer than usual in my herp building. I'm contemplating on keeping them both, if not one of them.

I am not entirely sure of the exact count. So far I have counted 15 babies. NO slugs, NO stillborns!

Once I felt that Sahira was done, I waited a few more minutes after she was looking around and checking the babies, because even though she was being careful not to squish any, she was accidentally kinda sitting on one, which I had to remove and work with him a little bit to get him to come back around and breathe good.. I removed her and placed her in the enclosure above(which I hated to do because she looked precious with her babies, but oh well

); the sire's enclosure(which I cleaned out well after removing him). I had moved him temporarily in a 50gallon rubbermaid, where he'll be there for a few days until I get all the babies moved out and seperated, momma's enclosure cleaned out completey and momma placed back in.

Sahira didn't get aggressive towards me or anything, though she didn't like when I touched her as she would push her body towards me(as if to push me away and cover her babies) and get a little tense, but I gently got my fingers under her, with no hisses or bites coming from her at all and she settled down.

I can feed her a normal, appropriately sized meal after she's done with her babies, right? Or a smaller meal? Or do I wait a day or several hours? I want to make sure before I feed her.

Heeeeeeere's the babieeees!