Animal lover Heather Mayers cuddles with a boa constrictor -- and is an iguana 'whisperer'

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

Nobody was more surprised than senior Heather Mayers when Bambi gave birth to five babies in February.

Graduating senior Heather Mayers gets a caress from her pet snake, Bambi. Charles Harrington/University Photography

"I didn't even know she was pregnant," said Mayers of her 6-foot-long pet boa constrictor. Mayers, an animal science major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, will graduate this weekend and start her first year at Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine in the fall.

One day Bambi was in her cage alone, and the next day she had five 20-inch-long babies, all with freshly shriveled umbilical cords. "They were really adorable; they were really cute," said Mayers, whose tender heart for animals has led her into professional animal health care.

Last summer at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo at Burnet Park in Syracuse, N.Y., Mayers encountered Cy, a rare, 5-foot-long iguana in deteriorating health. Since iguanas do not like captivity, they sometimes refuse to eat. On an internship at the zoo, Mayers became an "iguana whisperer" and tried to coax Cy to eat. His kidneys were failing, his phosphorous levels were high, he was dehydrated and was losing weight on an unbalanced diet of mainly mice. And he was very aggressive, said Mayers.

Taking him out of his pen, Mayers provided him with lots of sunshine and a diet of grapes and vegetables. "I learned that if you toss grapes to him, the tossing makes it look more like prey," she said. Soon, Cy began to eat, and his proper body weight returned.

But Mayers also had other herpetological mouths to feed at the Syracuse zoo. Before most people finish their morning coffee and bagel, she had fed the zoo's bog turtles, skinks (lizards), granite spiny and collared lizards, bearded dragons, blood python, reticulated python, emerald tree boa, poison dart frogs and dwarf caimens (alligators).

It took Mayers and 11 others to hold the very large reticulated python during its routine physical examination, conducted by Cornell veterinarians. "We had to go on and grab her before she coiled. Once she's coiled, she is hard to uncoil. She's a solid snake," she said.

For Mayers, life is not all lizards and snakes. She rode horses during her high school years in Clay, N.Y., and she currently serves as president of Cornell's Block and Bridle Club. In the summer of 2000, she spent her internship at the Grandview Acres farm in Groton, N.Y., milking 100 cows a day, making hay, tending crops, driving tractors and learning herd health.

Mayers will focus her graduate work on theriogenology, the branch of veterinary medicine that focuses on obstetrics, gynecology and semenology.

As for Bambi's five babies, Mayers has given four away to other students. But loving animals large and small defines her, she said with a smile: "I'll keep one."