Milk Snake
A kingsnake wearing coral snake colours, which is the whole of its defence: the bands say danger and the snake cannot back it up. Docile and easy to feed.
Overview
The milk snake is a wide ranging North American colubrid, 60 to 130 cm in the United States and up to 175 cm across its full range, with 25 recognised subspecies and an extraordinary variety of colour between them.
Several subspecies are Batesian mimics, patterned closely enough on coral snakes and copperheads that predators avoid them. The snake is harmless. The resemblance is the whole defence, and it is why milk snakes are killed on sight so often in the wild.
Temperament
Nervous when young and steady once grown. Hatchling milk snakes are quick and defensive, they musk, and they settle with regular gentle handling into calm adults.
They are nocturnal and secretive, so an enclosure with proper cover gets a snake that uses the space rather than one that hides in a corner. Like their kingsnake relatives they eat other snakes, and hatchlings in the wild feed predominantly on young snakes.
Care and grooming
Frozen thawed mice, and housed alone for the same reason kingsnakes are. This is a snake that eats snakes, and two in one enclosure is a bad outcome waiting for an excuse.
75 to 85 F across a gradient with 40 to 60 percent humidity. They are undemanding beyond that, and ADW gives an average captive lifespan of 22.6 years, which is longer than the fifteen to twenty usually quoted.
Living and exercise
Four feet of enclosure for an adult, with hides at both ends and substrate deep enough to burrow through. Milk snakes spend a lot of time under things and an enclosure without cover reads as an exposed one.
They breed once a year, laying two to seventeen eggs with an average of ten, and hatching after 28 to 39 days. Sexual maturity comes at three to four years, which is slow for a colubrid.
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