# Natrix schweizeri/milos grass snake



## spigotbush (Feb 8, 2019)

i thought i would start a thread on these guys. i found the anecdotal information is a little awkward and sparse so a thread for people to add anything about this species would be great. i would like to chronicle this baby as she grows and have somewhere to drop photos and videos for people to find.

so i will start with these. she is currently 5g and about the same size as a new pencil, in a 9l faunarium, to which i glued a fine mesh to the lid as the standard lid has small gaps but not small enough. she currently has a heatmat set at 29c and uvb, soil substrate which is deeper on the cool side, water bowl, some bark cover with moss/leaves for the hot spot, cork tube, real leaves torn up and scattered, a pile of dry moss under a large leaf and a half plant pot with moist moss. she is really shy and until recently i had the shelf screened off to minimise disturbance until she was eating properly. i have gradually removed the cover except when feeding and now i only put the cover back at night to minimise light disturbance, which i do for all my vivs. in the viv she will slurp away if she sees me but its less and less sudden as she gets used to me being around. i handle as little as possible for now given that she is tiny and fast. she is surprisingly confident with handling though. when i do take her out to clean the viv i take the opportunity to briefly handle and check her over. she will be flighty at first but within a few seconds she is back to tongue flicking and investigating. she has only musked me once so far, when i had put her in a butter tub whilst i was cleaning and when i opened it back up she gave the most hysterical display of ferocity, with the teeniest hiss and a strike pose. once i had her in hand again though she was back to sniffing around. she very much dislikes being surprised though so i do my best to let her know i am coming before opening up the tub.



















this morning i also managed to get some video of her feeding. she has been problematic to get started and i did resort to live guppies but i have worked clear of them now. i have found that it was much more effective to have food items just placed in the water rather than live fish as she catches them much easier. so currently i am just using frozen thawed trout, pinky and the odd bit of mouse tail. i fill the water bowl with aquarium water and drop the food in there and she is interested almost immediately. 
its a fairly long video with pretty poor quality but its nice to see her going about her business.


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## spigotbush (Feb 8, 2019)

thought i would do an update on this. Io is doing well, eating like a champ. i had her out today as she happened to show herself while i was cleaning. she is up to 14g and roughly 10 inches/26cm. hard to gauge the length of her as she is a quick little snake and i feel like it would be unnecessarily stressful (not to say extremely difficult) to try and get a length with a string. i dont see her very much, at least not in a way to gauge a length, so i am guessing against the length of the tub. she is still small but growing well in comparison. 
i see her fairly often when i check under the bark on the hot side, but its a fleeting glimpse. just enough to see that she is coiled normally and responding properly. i have her set up so that she cant see the room in deference to letting her do her thing. i wouldnt want to have her in a way that had her exposed, she likes her privacy and has always responded best to being able to take herself to cover. i will be able to see her more when she is bigger, i would rather she kept eating and stayed healthy right now.
she has certainly been developing an attitude, as i would expect for something so small. she has started trying to hiss at me when i touch her, which as i have said is only when necessary. then she has become a bit more liberal with musk. she wasnt too bad to begin with but today she made the room stink. you wouldnt expect such a small animal to be able to make such a smell. i dont personally find it that bad, kind of like wild garlic when its gone bad. but then i used to live in a wood that was a carpet of wild garlic in spring so it seems a fairly familiar smell. i can see how people might find it quite nasty though, took a hearty scrub to get it off my hands. i am good with it though, i like that she is getting bold enough to tell me to sod off.









i have decided to try and keep her up this winter. she is doing good but given the rough start to the year i would prefer to keep her going this winter. if she seems like she will go off food then i have the capacity to brumate easily but i will follow her lead on it. i have her tub set up inside a larger spare viv so that i can use a secondary heater to maintain ambient temps against the house, which gets chilly. 

i am still filling the water bowl with aquarium water and then putting the food in there. it is working so well that i really dont see any need to change it for now. i havent tried to feed from the tongs yet, maybe when she moves up to a bigger set up and i wouldnt have to approach from above. i am currently still feeding a mix of chopped trout chunks, whole f/t guppies (bred myself so i know they are clean) and half pinkies. a couple of weeks back i found a particularly small pinky in the bag and decided it was close enough to size to not be worth halving. i offered it in the usual way and i was glad that she took it, even more glad that she took it directly under the camera. she also roamed about the dish for a bit too so the video gives a pretty good look at her.


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