Going into Shed a Second Time

Things have been fairly routine with Havana lately. Every couple of weeks, we offer her food, she refuses, then she goes back to doing her own thing for a couple of weeks, until we try again. She was fairly active until about a week ago, which is when she started sleeping outside her hide pretty much all day (and night) long.

For the first few days she’d get up and move around at night for short bouts of time, then she stopped doing this altogether and simply slept, moving slightly only if she wanted to get into a more comfortable sleeping position. Thomas spotted her drinking water, which she rarely ever does as she prefers to take little licks from the water we spray onto the sides of her enclosure. After about five days, she began looking washed out and a few days ago, I noticed her eyes had turned blue.

In all honesty, I did not expect her to be going into shed again so soon. Although I’m aware that snakes shed every two or three months when they’re adults, and that it’s actually been around two months since Havana last started her pre-shed ritual, I didn’t clue in when she began to behave lethargically. I should have immediately recognized her behaviour since I’d seen it before.

That being said, I did notice in time to increase the humidity in her enclosure before she tried to shed her skin, which is good because otherwise she may have had a bad shed. And now that we’ve had her long enough to have seen her in shed twice, we can approximate the next time she’ll be in shed (which should be at the end of March), so that we can attribute any sluggish behaviour to her gearing up for her third shed.