Of course.
During the summer I keep mine on a sand, or sand and gravel mix. Despite all the hype around sand it is not actually dangerous to them as long as they have optimal temps. My kings get a hot spot up to 98 degrees in the summer. They do inevitably swallow the sand from time to time just by digging around it but neither have ever had any sort of digestion problems. Because I cool them down quite a bit in the winter I switch them over to news paper just to be on the safe side.
I will generally feed them out of the cage because they are on sand but if you are not going to use a particulate substrate that is not necessary.
Also it's nice to provide things for them to climb on, not all will use it but at least it gives them the option. My male thinks he is an arboreal sometimes and I will see him curled up in a fake plant with his head hanging down. But my female almost never uses any of her cage decor.
Here is my females cage last summer, I think I am going to go with a more natural look this year when they come out of brumation..but the colored sand was fun for a while.... very very cute when you walk by the cage and see a snake head sticking out of the sand with a little blue mound of sand on top of its head.
Here is the gorgeous girl, Spotlight, named for the spots on her tail. She is a striped morph cali king
Heres an old pic of my males cage.
Heres a more recent pic but still not fully update, I recently moved him in to a 20 long
This is what i mean about him hanging out of his little fake plant, i think he is to big for
that now
My eventual goal is to get them into planted desert vivariums but I cannot start work on that till after I move this summer so for now they are in these fairly simplistic set ups....
i am a big fan of live natural vivariums for most animals and I would like to have the vast majority of my future collection all in live vivs but kings snakes are very adaptable and they will be fine in a more simple essentials-only set up as well if that is what you prefer.
This is my current vivarium for my crested gecko and I would like to have this sort of set up for all my animals. Obviously they wont all be tropical...
