Christian Rebscher with a pair of slithery pets in downtown Red Bank. (Photos by Dan Natale. Click to enlarge)
By DAN NATALE
Twenty-nine-year-old Christian Rebscher started keeping snakes seven years ago, when he found an albino rat snake in the woods of northern Middletown. Two feet long and pregnant, it bit him, but he took it home anyway.
“If you feed them and wait a couple days, you can handle them without getting hurt,” he said.
Now, he occasionally shows off his reptiles as he rides his longboard through downtown Red Bank, as he did last Saturday, with the albino and an orange Cream-Sided Corn snake snaking around his neck and arms.
“I love bringing them out because they get a lot of attention” he says. “People are mostly amazed that you can wear snakes around your neck.”
Not long after she bit him, the albino gave birth to her first egg in RebscherÂ’s hands.
“I put it in a tank,” where it squeezed out more eggs, he said. “Five out of seven of them hatched.” He kept the babies for two weeks until he let them go in the woods he found their mother.
Rebscher, a Middletown resident, highly recommends snakes as pets because they’re not high maintenance. “You just keep them at one temperature and feed them once a week,” he said.
He tries to take them out whenever the weather is nice to give them fresh air, he said. But with winter coming, there may not be many more visits to Red Bank this year.
