​While on an overnight trip to Di-Lane Wildlife Management Area with a UGA Forestry school class, we passed the evening in a manner that only forestry students would think of. It wasn’t a game of capture the flag, but capture the armadillo! Several teams of students spent well over two hours scrambling in the palmettos before one team (my team; and caught by yours truly) finally caught a little armored fellow and won the competition. 

​I don’t remember exactly where I found him, but somewhere in Athens I came across the largest Eastern Hognose Snake I have ever found. This one went through all the classic defensive displays that I had read about in the reptile field guides.
 
His first offense was to puke up two toads that he had recently eaten. Seeing this was ineffective, he then went through his cobra-like display of flattening out and spreading his hood. But as I continued to poke and prod him along, he finally feigned his own death, rolling and writhing and ending up in a coil on his back.
 
Once he was “dead”, I retreated back several feet and waited to watch a “miracle” happen as he came alive and slithered off.

After the first iguana, the next reptile to join me was a chocolate and white California Kingsnake that I bought at Perfect Pets in Athens. Given my personality, it didn’t stop there and my reptile collection rapidly grew. As the menagerie expanded, so did my need for mice. I was so often at Perfect Pets that I ended up obtaining a job there.

​Once I had proven my trustworthiness with Carolyn Myers, the owner, the store’s captive breeding kingsnake collection came to my apartment. For a few years I bred several successful clutches of albino kingsnakes. It was like Christmas watching those incubating eggs nestled in vermiculite, waiting for little noses to slice the leathery shells!

​Having just gotten saved last December, two friends and I jumped in the car to drive across country to the Tucson Bible Conference. The miles passed along slowly, but in the middle of Texas, a large yellow Billboard appeared on the horizon. Just what us young reptile enthusiasts we’re looking for: the Brazos River Rattlesnake Ranch!
 
Just inside the front door, a huge bull snake lay in a wire cage. Sounding just like the rattle of a big diamondback, the bull snake forcefully exhaled a loud hiss, startling every visitor through the front door.

My passion for reptiles was spared in 1991 while living the Russell Hall dormitory at the University of Georgia. Two guys near the end of the 5th floor had an iguana they kept hidden from the hall monitors. The following year when I moved out of campus housing and into an apartment, I had an iguana… and then a second iguana!

I bought Oliver sometime in 1992 or 1993, and Yoshi followed shortly thereafter. Both were quite small at the time but I built them a large cage in the closet of my apartment room; not that they staying in their cage very often. They typically had the run of the room and basked on the window ledge. They had a pampered life and even had weekly swims in the bathtub.
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As well-fed iguanas do, they grew and grew. Oliver matured into a thick-necked and handsome male with quite a crest of spikes. Eventually, a few years later when my interests turned more toward snakes and the repeated trips to the grocery store for fresh collards and squash got old, I sold them both to a friend. The last I had heard was the both were doing well, but that their new owner had to make a trip to the hospital when he was bitten on the nose while trying to give Oliver a kiss!