Bullsnakes and Sonoran gophersnakes lead the pack when it comes to captive diversity and overall quality as a pet.  Due to the natural variety in the wild and the number of simple recessive traits available today, there are probably more available color and pattern variations in bullsnakes and Sonoran gophersnakes than in any other type of Pituophis in the world.  These subspecies are rightfully becoming VERY popular in today's pet market.

If you like normal Sonoran gophersnakes, then you almost can't help but love these guys.  I really don't have the room in my colony for these snakes, but there is no way I plan to get rid of the ones I have.  These are that nice looking! They are very unusual and rarely produced in captivity.  Research over the past 20 years or so has been showing that these snakes are Sonoran gophersnakes just west of the intergrade zone between Sonoran gophersnakes and bullsnakes.  That still leaves this population pretty variable, but they do typically key out as a true Sonoran gophersnake.  Very neat, beautiful animals.  These were erroneously referred to as bullsnakes or bullsnake intergrades in much of the older, out-dated, literature.

Blizzard Sonorans are as close to a solid white Pituophis with red eyes that you can get.  They are almost "bone white" as adults with almost no pattern showing.  Ghosts, or more accurately called axanthics (i.e., anerythristics) are grey and charcoal colored Sonoran gophersnakes, that have to be one of the single most beautiful snakes in existence.  If it weren't for ghost Sonorans, we probably wouldn't have any Sonoran gophersnake morphs at all!

Our male is a snow (i.e., albino anerythristic) blotched form.  This morph is very reminiscent in appearance to an albino checkered gartersnake, but it has the awesome Pituophis body shape and lacks the spastic habits of the similarly appearing gartersnake.  Since we only acquired this male to test out the genetics of the unknown morph described below, we have been very surprised at how quickly this guy has become one of our favorite, most docile, snakes.

Regardless of if it is the same line of anerythrism or not, Don's female has a very distinctive patterns that we have never before observed.  This female appears as if she is a (unique) intermediate between a striped and a blotched Pacific gophersnake.  Only future breeding trials will tell if this trait is inheritable or not. 

This subspecies of gophersnake combines all of the benefits of Pituophis (large babies that feed readily on pink mice, large/robust adults, docility in captivity, forgiving of minor husbandry mistakes, etc.) with all of the benefits of cornsnakes (mainly their smaller size).  In fact, Great Basin gophersnakes can be described as a slightly chunky, cornsnake-sized, bullsnake.  Get a mental image of that, and you have the typical Great Basin gophersnake!

Our albino group currently consists of a male albino and a female normal het for albino, and they are one of the few directly descended for a pure, wild-collected, albino Great Basin!  Ours are exceptionally pretty because they have been outcrossed to the Teasdale "Orange" locality of Great Basin Gophersnakes to bring out the beautiful oranges possible with thisline of albino Pituophis.  As with many of the best desereticola available, these are from eNVy Reptiles stock.

Our colony originated from a select group of WC babies chosen from probably 100+ field collected snakes.  Further selective breeding will only continue to improve on the look of these locality snakes. 

Speckled, or patternless, great basins display a trait very similar to the speckled gene in bullsnakes.  The Speckled gene in Great Basins is yunrelated to the bullsnake gene - these are pure Great Basin Gophersnakes.  As in bullsnakes, this mutation removes all blotches and puts a small speck of black on the center of each light brown colored scale all over the body of the snake.

Our current group consists of a male motley het speckled and a female het speckled that should be het for motley (depending on the mode of inheritance, of course).  We can't wait to help determine the inheritance on this trait, produce more of them (and possibly a super motley?), and maybe even see one of the first speckled motleys produced!

From this group we also get some hypomelanistic axanthic (i.e., what some people misleadingly call a TRUE ghost bullsnake) bullsnakes that are a light pale grey in coloration.  These hypo axanthics, sometimes called phantom bullsnakes, are still extremely rare in collections.

This marketting ploy began because some of the outcrossed hypomelanistic bullsnakes do start to take on the appearance of what a true T+ albino bullsnake should look like, but this is just the result of selective breeding with no evidence that it is due to a new gene or a new allele.  Regardless of the name used, hypomelanistic bullsnakes are lighter, brighter, bullsnakes than the typical, normal patterned ones.  Since bullsnakes are so variable in the wild and hypos have been crossed into many different locality phases, some hypomelanistics are darker than some wild populations (and vice versa).  

Most of our hypos are associated with our "speckled bullsnake" project and have a "faded hypo" look to them.

The original white-sided bullsnake line was started by Norm Dam.  Since they have a reduction in yellow and red pigmentation, they were quickly termed "white" and "anerythristic" bullsnakes.  White-sided bullsnakes are NOT true anerythristics, so this name is very misleading and confusing.  Because of this mistake, albino white-sided bullsnakes are typically called "snow bulls," and hypomelanistic white-sided bullsnakes are often called "ghost bulls."  White-sided bullsnakes also have a pattern mutation where the dorsal blotches become speckled, indistinct, and sometimes connected.  The amount of side pattern is highly variable, and all variations of the white-sided look in bullsnakes are allelic.  The best of the "Trumbower line" have only 4-5 scales wide of pigmentation along the spine, but the "Bell line" are typically very patterned along the sides of the animals.  These look more like a muddy-sided bullsnake than a white-sided, but they do have their uses when combined with other morphs. 

As a side-product of our speckled bullsnake project, we produce a few hypomelanistic albino whitesided, or "hybino snow," bullsnakes.  These Hybinos snows (and an occasionally normal patterned hybino) are unique in the genes they have and can pass on to their offspring making them a valuable breeder for someone with limited space for multiple snakes.

However, THAT is where selective breeding comes in.  We started with the Crumly line of red bullsnakes and selectively bred them to produce brighter red individuals, and we are raising up MANY more than we need.  In the last generation, we have raised up over 6, but we have only kept one for our current breeding project.  In the current generation, we are raising up another dozen or so with hopes to get 2 keepers.  Why so drastic?  This is how we plan to make our line produce as close to a 100% red individuals - and really red ones at that - in the upcoming decades.  Because of this, we plan to stay on the cutting edge level of red bullsnake production in the US and make them available to others that want to work with them as much as we do.  Finally, the Crumly line of red bullsnakes are not a locality animal (i.e., they are generics), but they are almost definitely descended from a lot of south Texas bloodline based on adult morphology.

As a surprising side-line in our red bullsnake project, we started getting some individuals that we refer to as "Tiger Stripe" red bullsnakes.  These guys are the next step in the evolution of the red bullsnake morph!  Not only do they come from our extremely red "red bullsnake" line, but the body blotches have been compressed and increased in number to a point well beyond anything seen in a bullsnakes!  Many of our hold-backs have in excess of 100 body blotches (which excludes any blotches on the tail, of course).  This high blotch counts seem to function in a similar manner to stripes on a garter snake or a zebra: when the animal moves the complex pattern breaks it up so that a predator can't really see the animal.  Boy, does it work, too!  These "tiger stripes" almost get you dizzy to watch when the snakes are trying quickly crawl away from you!  In our colony, anything with about 90 body blotches or more are called Tiger Stripe red bullsnakes.  We are extremely excited and hopeful about what this project will produce in the future. 

We were recently lucky enough to acquire an entire clutch of Kingsville red bullsnakes directly from John Ginter.  From this entire clutch, we hope to keep the best pair or so to begin the process of drastic culling in hopes of doing to the Kingsville reds what we have already done to the Crumbly reds - improve them further.  unlike many that get a pair and breed them, we are getting MANY pairs to just select out the best to breed so we can repeat the process over.  Of course, we have a long-term goal to combine the best of both of these lines in hopes of getting a unique red bullsnake better than either line can produce on its own!

The patternless mutation, which was originally found in a WC Nebraska bullsnake, is a simple recessive trait that removes the body blotches normally seen in bullsnakes and leaves a single dark speck present on each scale.  The founder wild-collected male also ended up being a het carrier for axanthic.  This project has been out-crossed with hypomelanstic bullsnakes, white-sided bullsnakes, etc.  There has always been some doubt about the purity of the original WC male; however, we've found no strong evidence to indicate that these are not pure animals.  The speckled bullsnakes have also been called patternless bullsnakes by some.  Price will depend upon the actual color phases and hidden genetic traits of the animals we produce. 

As a by-product of this project, we produce a LOT of bullsnakes het (or at least possible het) for speckled, white-sided, albino, axanthic, or hypo if they aren't actually displaying one or more of those traits directly.  Inquire about specific availability!