Corn snake "panicked"
((I'm sorry, wall of text))
We were watching tv with the lights out last night and Squiggles began to panic and jump/slither around her cage really quickly. For fear that she may hurt herself I cut the light on and picked her up. She was fine, slithering around like normal, tongue flicking as if nothing had happened and she wasn't tense at all. After about 10 minutes of letting her wander around in mine and my boyfriend's hands we put her back into her enclosure. She seemed to fret at first and poke around the edges in a frenzy, but she calmed down and returned to her normal "patrol" around the edges of the enclosure to try and find a way out.
I am thinking that perhaps she climbed up onto one of the edges of the enclosure and fell, maybe that spooked her? She has only ever done this one other time when I wasn't in the room. My boyfriend opened the lid to her enclosure and he said she panicked a moment before poking her head out to "escape". We usually will handle her on and off throughout the day for 5-10 minutes at a time, so she is pretty used to us being in and out of her enclosure. We do not handle her for a few days after she has eaten, and when we do handle her we just let her wander through our fingers or slither on our bed for a while under supervision. When we feed her we take her out and feed her in a separate "feeding tub" in the floor.
I don't think her bedding has anything to do with her "freak out" because she's had the same bedding since we got her and this hasn't happened in the past. We use Zoo Med's aspen chip bedding because she loves to burrow in it all the time.
We watched her all day long today and she seems to be her normal squiggly self, but what happened last night still has me wondering what that was. Sorry, I worry too much! This is the first snake that I have been able to call my own. My brother got her for me after helping him raise 10 of his own snakes. ^^;
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