Corn Snake
A North American rat snake, and the one most keepers start with: even tempered, steady in the hand, and bred into a long list of colours.
Overview
The corn snake is a North American ratsnake from the eastern and south central United States into northern Mexico, 70 to 120 cm as an adult, and it is the snake most often recommended to somebody who has never kept one. That recommendation has held for decades because the animal genuinely is straightforward rather than because it is small.
It lives in deciduous forest and rocky ground where crevices and logs make nests, and in fields, grassland and the edges of houses. Over half the wild diet is rodents.
Temperament
Active, curious and easy to handle. Corn snakes explore rather than hide, which makes them one of the few snakes that is interesting to watch as well as to hold.
They are day active, becoming crepuscular in hot weather. A frightened corn snake may vibrate its tail against leaf litter, which sounds alarming and is a bluff. Nothing about the species is dangerous to a person, and a bite from one is a scratch.
Care and grooming
Frozen thawed mice, weekly, sized to the snake. Thaw under refrigeration and warm before offering, and do not feed live: an uneaten rodent bites, and those wounds run from superficial to deep punctures that need surgery.
75 to 88 F across a gradient and 40 to 50 percent humidity. Corn snakes are forgiving about most things and unforgiving about escape, so the enclosure is chosen for its catches rather than its looks.
Living and exercise
Four feet of enclosure for an adult, with hides at both ends, branches to climb and a substrate deep enough to burrow into. They use more of an enclosure than most snakes do.
The longest recorded captive corn snake lived just over 32 years, so the fifteen to twenty years usually quoted is a floor rather than a ceiling. It is a long commitment in a small package, which is worth saying plainly before a first snake goes home.
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