Milk Snakes

Snakes -> Milk Snakes

Milk snakes belong to the same genus as the king snakes - Lampropeltis - and are to my eyes probably the most beautiful commonly-kept snake of all.

They're generally harder to find than, say, common color forms of king snakes and corn snakes but the search is well worth it.

The general appearance is of rings of color along the body of black, white and bright red, though some breeders have created an orange form too.

Several species may be found including the Honduran milk snake, Sinoloan milk snake, Mexican milk snake and Pueblan milk snake though arguably size and appearance is very similar between the species.

Milk snakes are generally very docile and handleable though youngsters can be a little more flighty than some other species. With time and patience they seem to calm down just fine.

Growing to 100 - 150cm in length (though exceptionally they may reach 2 metres) they tend to be smaller than corn snakes yet are easily handled and kept in captivity.

A similar setup to that discussed for corn snakes will do an admirable job for milk snakes with a 75 - 90 cm long cage with a hotspot of around 28'C suiting them perfectly.

I have bred milk snakes several times in the past with success and this can be easily achieved by the hobbyist.

I would to summarise that this is more of a snake to watch than to handle, but I highly recommend you investigate milk snakes further as a potential pet snake if you haven't already done so