Many times we get discouraged when things don’t go as planned. And then we give up. This even applies to ball python breeders. What I have found is that patience is your best ally when working on a project. Seeing a project from start to finish is a great goal to achieve. Whether it is breeding a pair of het pieds together to make your first pieds or breeding for an albino spider, it is worth the wait to see the project become reality. In both the previous situations I did just that. My first pied was produced from a het to het pairing. That was a quicker project though.
My albino spider was more of a production. I had to not only raise my albino female to breeding size but then breed her son Spider het albino back to her and he would not breed until his second season! I started that project in 2006 and didn’t get to the end result until 2012!
That is 6 years invested in the project! That is along time for one baby snake! But it was worth the wait. The majority of the female ball pythons in my collection are females that I produced and raised. It is very rewarding to see the full cycle from breeding, eggs, hatching, to breeding, eggs, and hatching again when you produced and raised the animals. There were plenty of times when everything seemed to go wrong from eggs going bad to babies not eating, but I stuck it out and am glad I did.
Another example is my charcoal project. I have worked on that since 2007 when I acquired the original male. It took until 2013 for me to get anywhere with that and I am sure glad that I saw it through to where it is now. It is going to be a hot morph to get this season. Just wait and see!
For everyone out there thinking they cannot do it…yes you can, just be patient. Nothing happens over night.
TheOddBall 
AMEN brotha! I have MANY examples that parallel Lehe’s (Peter’s) including my first pied that began with 50% POSS Het males, each at an initial investment of nearly $1500.00 from Peter Kahl in 1998. After flying to Baltimore, my home town, I visited Pete where he was kind enough to allow me to look through ALL of his poss het male holdbacks (30 or so) and choose ANY I wanted. I chose the LARGEST (DUH!).
After receiving only FIVE (5) of the original SIX (6) (The BIGGEST one , 900+ grams, went to CA with the other investor in the project and he promptly lent it to someone who was NEVER to be heard from again!), two of the males died of RI leaving only THREE (3) to work with, effectively cutting my odds to producing hets by another margin. After breeding I, of course, held back ALL of the females and dumped the males as normals as we had not determined the het markers.
By the time I had acquired a het male from Pete in 2002 the markers were suspected but not absolute so I ran him against all the females that had reached breeding size, three if I recall correctly. One went and on the last egg of the season of 157 Snowflake emerged! BAM! went my fists into the air and nearly through the drop ceiling!!!! Five seasons, long odds and the desire to reach the finish line kept me on point, despite MANY setbacks. ALL WELL WORTH IT!
Snowflake has been featured in The Ball Python Manual and Designer Morphs by John Berry (original edition) as an example of high white (98%) Pibald ball python. He currently resides in a Japanese herper’s collection.
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