Harper's Outdoor Book for Boys

by Joseph H. Adams

In some parts of the country pets are made of reptiles, and very interesting and tame ones are found among the lizard family.

When making a reptile pen, care should be taken to get the joints tight and not have any small openings or cracks between boards, for snakes can get through a very small space, often much smaller than you would think it possible, judging from the size of their bodies.

In Fig. 24, the design for a very substantial reptile pen is shown, and instead of fine wire screening, two heavy plates of glass may be used at the front of each compartment. This is a double pen, and one side can be used for snakes, while the other may harbor some lizards or small land-turtles.

This pen is forty-eight inches long, twenty-four deep, and twenty-six high. The bottom rail at the front is four inches wide, and the top and upright ones are two inches wide.

The wood from which the pen is made should be tongue-and-grooved, and planed on both sides. It may be from three-quarters to one inch and a quarter thick, and narrow boards are preferable to wide ones.

In the lizard compartment an upper floor is fastened in, having an opening at one side where an inclined board, with cross sticks attached, is arranged so that the animals may climb up and down.

The snake pen should have a portion of a small tree fastened at top and bottom, on which the reptiles may climb and coil. The more short branches it has, the better, for it will then give the snakes a more satisfactory perch to move about on. At the bottom of each end a small trap doorway four inches high and six inches long is cut, and protected by a stout wire-cloth door, hinged and locked. These trap-doors are for the purpose of removing refuse or for feeding the reptiles; or a smaller opening at the back, near the top, and about two inches in diameter, can be used as a food door.

A ventilator is cut in the roof twelve inches long and six inches wide, so that each compartment gets the advantage of an opening about six inches square. Over this a roof is made three inches above the main roof, and with stout wire cloth the opening is covered first at the under side. Then the strip of wire cloth, four inches wide, is tacked around the inside of the opening and to a board the same size as the hole, or six by twelve inches, attached to the under side of the cap.

This arrangement is more clearly shown in Fig. 25, which is a sectional view, A being the cap, B the board to which the upper edge of the wire cloth is attached, C the wire cloth, and D the main roof to the pen. The line E represents the wire cloth tacked to the under side of the opening, to prevent the reptiles crawling up and over the partition.