When you hatch a clutch of western hognose babies, you go in knowing there will be personalities. Some will be shy, some will hiss like tiny dragons, some will act like you personally offended their entire bloodline. Hognoses are characters, and their hatchlings are no different.
But they eat. Eventually, they eat. That's the baseline assumption you go in with, and for seven of our eight hatchlings from this season, it held.
Hopper was the eighth.
Hopper hatched on July 14th, 2025, one of eight from Bajsa and Hoggy's first clutch together, a normal morph female, seemingly healthy from the moment she emerged. She went through her first shed on schedule. She moved around her tub with the same alert, curious energy as her siblings. Nothing in those early days suggested she was going to be different.
And then feeding day came.
She refused.
That's not immediately alarming with hognose hatchlings. A refusal on the first offer is common enough that most experienced keepers don't even register it as a concern. You note it, you try again in a few days, you give the animal time to settle. So we tried again. And again. We worked through the standard toolkit: plain pinkies, brained pinkies, pinkies scented with tuna, pinkies scented with salmon, leaving food overnight in case she preferred to eat without an audience. We tried different prey sizes. Different times of day. Different levels of disturbance during the offer.
Nothing.
Weeks passed. Then more weeks. And somewhere around the two month mark, the feeling shifts. It stops being "she's just being stubborn" and starts being something harder to name — a background worry that sits with you throughout the day and surfaces every time you open the rack to check on her.
By the time Hopper was approaching three months without a single meal, it was visible.
Hognose hatchlings have almost no reserves to draw on. They're small animals to begin with, and the yolk absorption that sustains them in those first post-hatch days only carries them so far. A hatchling that isn't eating by weeks four or five is already running at a deficit. By month two, that deficit becomes something you can see: a body that looks thinner than it should, a spine more visible than it should be, a quality of movement that lacks the quick, purposeful energy of a healthy hatchling.
Hopper was still moving. Still alert enough. But she looked depleted in the way that only an animal who has been burning through its own reserves for weeks looks depleted. Less curious than she'd been. Less likely to investigate when her tub was opened. Quieter, in the way that worried you more than the hissing ever could.
This is the part of keeping that doesn't come up much in care guides. The second-guessing. The replaying of every decision — the enclosure setup, the temperatures, the humidity, the feeding technique — trying to identify what you're doing wrong when the answer might simply be that some hatchlings are genuinely, inexplicably, stubbornly resistant to feeding in ways that don't have a clear cause or a clean solution.
I kept trying. Because there wasn't another option.
On October 13th, 2025 (three months after hatch day) I opened the fridge to prep another meal for Hopper. Tuna, same as the last several attempts. And sitting at the back of the fridge, behind everything else, was a can of hake. I genuinely don't remember buying it. It was just there.
I looked at it for a moment. Then I thought: why not.
I put a small piece of tuna on one side of Hopper's tub and a piece of hake on the other, closed the lid, and walked away. Not with hope, exactly. More with the particular resignation of someone who has tried enough things that one more attempt doesn't carry much weight in either direction anymore.
When I came back, the tuna was exactly where I'd left it.
The hake was gone.
I checked the corners of the tub, thinking she might have dragged it somewhere. I moved the paper towel around a little. Nothing. And then I looked at Hopper properly, and there was a small but unmistakable lump in her belly.
She had eaten the hake!
Out of everything (the brained pinkies, the tuna, the salmon, the weeks of patient attempts with every scenting trick I knew) she'd eaten a piece of hake from a can I didn't even remember buying. No technique, no coaxing. Just hake, apparently, at the right moment, for reasons known only to her.
I've tried to explain this to people who don't keep reptiles, and it's difficult to convey properly. A small snake eating a piece of fish doesn't sound like much. But after three months of daily worry, of watching her get thinner, of running through every possibility and coming up empty — the relief of seeing that lump in her belly was completely disproportionate to the event itself.
I didn't analyze it. I didn't immediately try to figure out how to transition her onto more practical prey. I just stood there for a moment and felt the weight of three months of background stress quietly lift.
She ate. That was all that mattered.
Once a hatchling that has refused for an extended period finally takes its first meal, the temptation is to push immediately — offer again the next day, try to establish momentum before it disappears. In practice, this often backfires. A hatchling that has just eaten after a long refusal needs time to digest fully, and offering too soon can trigger a stress response that undoes the progress you've made.
We gave Hopper several days before the next offer. She took hake again. Then again after that. Because hake is a fairly fatty fish, the caloric value of even small pieces was meaningful for an animal her size, you could see weight coming back gradually, the spine becoming less prominent, her movement slowly returning to something closer to what it had been at hatch.
It wasn't fixed. But it was moving in the right direction. And for the first time in three months, that felt like enough.
In part two: just when things finally seemed to be improving, something else entirely went wrong.
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