Our history

From a boy with a pet boa to one of the Northeast's largest reptile breeders.

Kevin McCurley has bred reptiles for more than three decades. This is how NERD started, and how Zoo Creatures grew out of it.

The beginning
A kid from Lexington who bred his first snakes at 14
Kevin McCurley grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. It started with fish he bred himself and a fascination with the native bugs and reptiles around him.
At 14 he bred his first snakes: a pet boa project backed by his father, Ellis McCurley, a 1947 US Naval Academy graduate and former NASA contributor in radar communication for the defense department. Ellis did a lot to grow Kevin's interest in the natural world.
1983 – 1987
Two degrees, a lab job, and the wrong life
Kevin studied computer science from 1983 to 1987, earned two degrees and went to work in electronics R&D. He did well there. It never felt like his.
Early 1990s
NERD: a hobby collection that started paying for itself
Kevin left to follow the animals and founded New England Reptile Distributors. NERD began the way many breeders do: a personal collection grows, word spreads, and the animals start paying their own way.
His early breeding focused on Pituophis and other large colubrids.
The python years
Retics and ball pythons, before everyone else
Kevin's interest turned to pythons, and especially the ones few keepers were working with at the time: retics, which people thought were too big and too unpredictable, and ball pythons.
NERD became known worldwide for large-scale ball python breeding and for building designer morphs by combining patterns and colors. Kevin was one of the first to identify and breed mutations, and many of the morphs in the NERD collection were the first ever bred, right here at the NERD facility.
- Bumblebee
- Spider
- Pastel Jungle
- Ghost
- Honeybee
- Killer Bee
- Caramel Albino
- Orange Ghost
1996 · 1999
Caramel Albino, then the Spider
Two NERD milestones in the ball python records: the Caramel Albino in 1996 and the Spider in 1999, which became one of the morphs NERD is best known for.
Retics & monitors
The Cow, the Calico, and the first albino monitors
Kevin pushed reticulated python breeding forward too. The Cow retic is his.
NERD also pioneered Asian water monitor breeding and produced the first captive-bred albino monitors in the U.S.
- Cow
- Calico
- Golden Child
- Phantom Stripe
- Ultra-Ivory
- Citrus
- Citrus Albino
2001
Zoo Creatures opens
Kevin opened Zoo Creatures, NERD's retail store: reptiles, amphibians, fish, small animals and everything it takes to keep them.
2005
He wrote the book on ball pythons
Kevin published The Complete Ball Python. He has gone on to write more than one book.
November 2005
On Conan, with Steve Irwin
When Steve Irwin appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien with a giant anaconda, Kevin was the keeper beside him, handling it. Kevin has talked on camera about working with Steve since.
2007
149 Plaistow Road
NERD grew in stages: first a 5,000 sq ft breeding center, then the building at 149 Plaistow Road, built in 2007. Today its 14,000 sq ft hold both the NERD breeding facility and the Zoo Creatures store.
Ball and reticulated pythons are still the core. The collection also takes in monitors, green tree pythons, boas, rock iguanas, and Wally, the resident 8-foot alligator.
Tours & shows
Bringing people face to face with the animals
Education has always been part of the job. NERD gives lectures and animal encounters for schools, scout groups, churches and universities, and hosts birthday parties at the facility.
Before COVID, NERD ran public tours every Saturday and Sunday. Today tours are private and booked ahead, and Kevin leads his own, with a venomous demonstration.
The venom room
Behind its own door
NERD keeps a venomous collection, among them king cobras and Gaboon vipers, in rooms only cleared keepers enter. Every enclosure carries a card naming the species and the antivenom for it.
On YouTube
Hundreds of thousands watching
Kevin and the NERD crew film the animals, the breeding and the venom room for the New England Reptile channel on YouTube (@NewEnglandReptile), where hundreds of thousands of people subscribe.
Today
Education, outreach, and the wild
Kevin now spends much of his time on education and outreach: programs on pollinators, wildlife and the natural sciences, and work for threatened native species. Since 2024 he has been reaching past New England to help conserve species from around the world.