Pacific Boa Constrictor Snakes (Candoia bibroni bibroni)

Is it a Fiji boa? Is it a fire breathing dragon? You decide.... Well. OK it's boa - and a very tiny one, but such Fire!

I have two extremes of Fiji Boa size in my house at the moment: Thomasina (vastly pregnant) I estimate at over 2m long, weighing almost 3Kg, while the two babies we just got from Taveuni, now three weeks old, are about 33 cm long and weigh 11 gms each. The babies are eating one small frozen (and thawed) house gecko a week (straight from the floor of a feeding cup), while Thomasina really hasn't eaten much at all for the last 2 or 3 months. It's the coldest time of the year here right now (down to 20oC at night) and the babies are spending all their time curled up into little balls hidden inside dried fern leaves, while Thomasina, who is too fat to coil up tightly, seems to be enjoying a "cushion" made of a locally woven coconut leaf bag filled with fern leaves. My others are also all curling up under the smallest hides they can fit into at night, (sometimes it's a pile of 3 snakes with a hide riding high on top of them as they all push in at once). They seem more ...

Finally we have some new babies - not from our own pregnant snake-in-waiting, but from our friends at Paradise Resort on Taveuni Island. During land clearing a pregnant wild female was found and gave birth in captivity on 29 June. She had 27 live babies, in three different colour ways, many with amazingly orange eyes. See below for photos taken 9 - 10 days after birth..... Momma, resting