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  Today I woke up about an hour earlier than usual.  I couldn't sleep due to the anticipation of two little noses that pipped through their eggs the day before.  I  stumbled into the snake room and checked the box.  Nothing.  I figured I'd have to wait another day to see what popped out of the eggs.  I took a second look, and realized the two eggs in question were actually empty!  I carefully poked my finger into the substrate in the box, and out popped a little head.  After a bit of coaxing, I held in my hand our very FIRST tessera corn snake hatchling!  I poked some more, looking for the other one.  One the other side of the box, a head emerged.....but this one looked different than the first....

 I couldn't figure out exactly what I was looking at, so I gingerly plucked the hatchling out of the damp substrate.  To my bleary eyes, this one looked a lot brighter than it's sibling.  I had no idea what I had just hatched...

This afternoon I was making my normal rounds through the snake room and I checked on the sunkissed girl we have on loan from Sharon at Blue Ridge Reptiles.  To my pleasant surprise she was sitting on a big clutch of eggs!  She had her pre-lay shed only about 7 days ago....so I wasn't expecting eggs for another couple of days.  This is one of our MOST exciting clutches, fathered by our Tessera corn "Stagger Lee". 

Needless to say we will be eagerly awaiting July 5, 2010...which is when these are due to hatch!

 This morning I awoke to a nice pile of eggs in my Caramel girl's lay box.  She Had laid about a dozen, and was working on more.  As of last check she has laid about 20-25 eggs total!  She is a Caramel with unknown hets, bred to a Hypo het Caramel and possibly het stripe, so we should get some interesting babies!

So with the hatch of our last clutch a couple of weeks ago, the 2009 breeding season is officially over.  We had quite a nice one...managing to get a 100% hatch rate and absolutely NO kinks or deformities of any kind.  We only had 3-5 slugs total...which is almost unheard of.  I did lose the ball python eggs, but that was because I wasn't expecting them and didn't have an incubator.  I'm not even 100% sure they were fertile to begin with. 

We managed to prove out a LOT of hets this year....Lucian and Sienna gave us some GORGEOUS lavenders and normals, all aberrant patterned, but also two OPALS!  This means they both carry the gene for amelanism.  Speaking of amelanism, we also proved our miami pair are also BOTH het for amel...they produced some GREAT looking reverse okeetees for us!  Other than that, we also managed to prove that our sunglow stripe male is het for anerythrism.  When bred to our snow female, we got snow and amel babies!

As I said, it was a GREAT season...and next year should be even better!!