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09/19/2026

A twelve-foot king cobra whipped around and bit George Van Horn four times on the arm. Eleven and a half feet, his best venom producer.

Hear stories and lessons like this from George and Tom Crutchfield in Introduction to the Art of Keeping Reptiles. Orientation Wednesday September 30.

Comment LEARN and we’ll DM you the link.

King cobra footage: Kevin McCurley, New England Reptile Distributors.

09/19/2026

Our first course, “Introduction to the Art of Keeping Reptiles” featuring Tom Crutchfield, George Van Horn, Steve Angeli, Kevin McCurley, and Stacey Crutchfield drops Friday October 2nd. Comment “Learn” and we’ll dm you the link for registration.

09/19/2026

More on modes!

09/18/2026

Truly the best therapy there is.

09/02/2026

Got to be the prettiest Gila on Instagram. Produced by the Heloderma Master Steve Angeli

09/01/2026

Let’s talk about the “Spin Trick.”

09/01/2026

Most people know Kevin McCurley as a world class breeder, keeper, and handler. What fewer people know is how much of his attention goes to conservation, and how long it has.

We are on this planet every day, and just by being here we make it harder for animals like these. Kevin does this as a positive against that, to give them as much of a head start in life as he can.

Head starting means harvesting the eggs and incubating them artificially, so nothing reaches them in the ground. Nests get taken by predators, native and invasive, and by people, who dig them up and destroy them on purpose, or take them out with construction and development without thinking about the animals at all.

He incubates the clutch at NERD until it hatches. After years of doing it he can incubate just about any species successfully. Once they hatch he releases them back into these curated environments, set up for the animals to feed, breed and hold. In the video he is cutting back greenery he planted so sand can go in for the adults to nest on.

This pond is kept for snapping turtles (Chelydra serpentina). He has curated other habitats for wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta), a species of special concern in New Hampshire, and Blanding’s turtles (Emydoidea blandingii), listed here as endangered.

He does the same work with Dr. Steve Dinkelacker, another of our faculty, on American alligators in North Carolina and elsewhere. He also leads international conservation initiatives in India, and works with people from countries all over the world on all sorts of reptiles and other animals.

Follow for more highlights from our faculty’s conservation projects.

09/01/2026

We spent a week with Tom and Stacey Crutchfield at their place in Florida while we were building this course. Tom is a pioneer in keeping reptiles in general and especially venomous animals, and he is just a wealth of information on any part of it you want to ask about.

One thing a lot of people don’t know is that he supplied animals to venom labs, and he owned and operated his own venom labs as well. That was one of the things we got onto with him, the connection between the people who keep reptiles and what ends up in a pharmacy, and what that has meant for the rest of us.

The Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum) is the one you the world should know recognize. There is a peptide in its venom, which is just a short chain of amino acids, a very small protein. A synthetic copy of that peptide became exenatide, the first GLP-1 drug approved for type 2 diabetes back in 2005, and the weight-loss shots everybody and their mama is on right now sit in that same class.

This is one example out of a lot of them. If the general public had any idea how much of what they use every day has come out of reptiles, the global conservation message would land very differently than it does now, because it is a lot easier to make the case for an animal when people can see how it affects them.

That is one of a lot of topics we covered with him. We got into the history of it, how the operations actually ran, and Tom’s own path through all of it. These are things you would not know unless you got to sit down for an afternoon and ask somebody who has that much experience behind him, and that is what we did, so we could share it with everybody.

Record 001 of the Culebra Codex Archive, with Tom Crutchfield. There is a lot more of this coming.

Introduction to the Art of Reptile Keeping opens Wednesday 30 September, and pre-registration is open now at citadelculebra.com/enroll.

08/30/2026

Kevin talks about modes constantly. 40 years with large constrictors and other incredible but serious reptiles, and what he reemphasizes time and time again is that they live in different modes, and they’re always in one of them. Sleeping, hunting, panic, curious, defensive, breeding. This skill isn’t just reading which mode the animal is in. It’s understanding what you do next is what can move the animal from one mode into another.

That changes by species, by individual animal, and even morph to morph.

Giani opened the door on a 16-foot ivory Retic with his face right down at the gap, which is one of the things Kevin explains can be problematic, and he explains why. Watch her head. She’s watching him, and then she’s decided about him.

Rule one is the snake never gets to think that you’re food. Feeding mode is one that can sometimes result in an accidental bite, and it doesn’t take much. Not only does it not take that much to get them into it, but sometimes it’s almost a default for many snakes.
We also put the Papuan Python (Apodora papuana) in, to show another mode and a big, powerful snake. Papuan Pythons are snake eaters. They’re pound-for-pound some of the strongest snakes around, and about as food-motivated as they come, same as a Woma or a Burmese or even a Retic. We used the hook to interrupt the snake’s focus, and she still thought it was food. The animal bit and wrapped it, and it took several minutes of her just lying there on the floor constricting a hook for her to work out that it was an inanimate object and that she had made a mistake. After that she was completely fine. We had her out for a bit, exploring and crawling around.

Had that been a hand reaching, it would have been an arm wrapped instead.

This is early in Giani’s time with Retics. He got bit, collected himself, and Kevin gave him credit for it on camera. We’re going through the modes one at a time in this series, and over the next few you’ll watch him progress to a very experienced, advanced Reticulated Python handler during his time at NERD.

Credits: New England Reptile · Kevin McCurley, Founder of NERD and Chief Academic Officer for Citadel Culebra · Origin

08/25/2026

What an absolutely fantastic-looking animal.

Come learn genetics with our Chief Academic Officer, founder of NERD, Kevin McCurley, with his world’s first albino mangrove snakes.

This is Crowley. He is an adult male albino Boiga melanota and is the first albino Boiga in this world that we know of.

Be on the lookout for Crowley’s offspring, or snakes like Crowley, at newenglandreptilestore.com

Continue to watch this journey as Kevin and the NERD team continue working on this project.

Come learn with us at the school.
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