Mating of Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis ‘Flame’ and ‘Cappuccino’
Jennifer Rejchel
All of us who have ever bred our beautiful snakes are familiar with the ‘waiting game’ – a nerve-wracking, sometimes long lasting game between hope and resignation. If you are lucky, you can observe the mating and then calculate when you can expect offspring. Well, approximately, because the time of mating is not necessarily the time of fertilisation. Some of you have certainly experienced this as well.
This year, I bred three pairs:
Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis Quebec Flame
Thamnophis sirtalis concinnus
Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis ‘Flame’ het amelanistic + Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis amelanistic melanistic (also called Cappuccino)
The T. s. sirtalis Quebec Flame kept me waiting in vain, and the T. s. concinnus took the waiting game so far that I had already given up hope of a litter. But actually, I would like to tell you about the third litter here.
On 7 February 2025, my T. s. sirtalis Flame female shed her skin and I added my T. s. sirtalis amelanistic-melanistic male, who immediately set to work, so that shortly afterwards I was able to observe the two mating.
Very nice, for me. This allowed me to calculate that I could hope for babies in 60 days. But you always drive yourself a little crazy, and when you see your animals every day, you don’t really notice whether the animal looks thicker or not. So Anke Dreier, in particular, had to suffer, as she does almost every year, because I kept sending her pictures with the question ‘does she look pregnant?’ After all, what are friends for?
But Anke wasn’t the only one who had to suffer. Even though I have gained quite a bit of experience and consider myself an experienced owner, there are always those who have even more experience than you do. I praise the EGSA for not holding back on knowledge, advice and support, and for allowing you to discuss questions such as ‘does the animal look pregnant?’
In fact, I only had to wait 74 days. She gave birth to her babies on the night of 20th of April, and on Easter morning I was able to go on my very own ‘egg hunt’.
Since I want to stress the females as little as possible, especially when they may be pregnant, my females remain in their furnished terrariums and I start collecting the babies I see while I can then clear out the terrarium piece by piece and continue searching. In the meantime, the mother was placed in a separate box and rewarded for her work with some baby rats, which she was only too happy to take.
Once I had turned the entire terrarium upside down, I had caught a small litter of 10 animals. Relatively few for a T. s. sirtalis, but I was still happy, because the following were born:
2 Flame
2 amelanistic Flame
5 wild-colored
1 wild-colored with some red on the sides.
I found the distribution quite exciting, because I had actually expected fewer red animals. But this shows once again that the erythristic gene, which is also responsible for the flame color, is a little unpredictable.
I hope that I will be able to breed this combination again in 2026 and that I will perhaps get a larger litter, because I would be very interested to see what the color distribution would be like.
Jennifer Rejchel
Reschop 14
45525 Hattingen