Western Hognose Snake not eating?

Question
Hi, I found a young female Western Hognose snake in a swimming pool around the end of December. I live 30 miles outside of Houston, Tx. The weather here is constantly changing during the day but the nights are still very cold.

The snake won't eat pre-killed lizards, pinkys, or geckos. I tried soaking in tuna, split braining, scenting pinky with lizard and gecko blood. I found out this snake normally eats toads but I can't find any this time of year. Could the snake still be hibernating or in a state of torpor because of the lack of food available? I noticed that she is drinking lots of water everyday and occasionally dipping parts of her body in the water.

I've had the snake inside of a heated 10 gallon aquarium for 3 weeks now. I'm using a heating pad mounted directly underneath and a flourescent light fixture above with a Reti-sun 5.0 bulb. It gets pretty cold in my house sometimes so I added a lamp with a 60 watt heat emitter to the enclosure. I'm trying to heat one side of the enclosure to the mid 90's as a basking area during the day. During the night I leave the heating pad on and the enclosure stays between 70 and 78 degrees.

I decorated the inside with a small Exo-Terra rock outcrop for her to hide in and a rock water dish. I also put a real rock inside because I read that it helps with shedding? I'm also thing about getting a humidity box with moss just in case she is trying to shed.

So far sounding good?

So the real question is...How do I get the snake to eat?
I can't afford to take it to the vet to force feed and I can't locate a single frog or toad anywhere. I thought about letting her go back in the wild but I'm afraid she won't make it very far. I mean she did almost end up getting sucked into the skimmer of my pool. That's nature though I guess. Please let me know what anyone reading this thinks. Should I let her go or keep trying?

I'm thinking about calling the Houston Wild Life although the last time I did they didn't help me much at all. Basically they didn't care. Last year during the fall I rescued 11, seriously 11 baby red-ear slider turtles from several different pools that I provided service. I took care of them and fed them all in a 55 gal. aquarium until they got bigger and in early march of 2008- I let them go in a huge lake far away from society. Hopefully I can do the same for this awesome snake although I would like to keep it as a pet.

If anyone has any helpful comments or information please let me know asap. Thank you for your time.  

Answer
Hognoses, especially wild-caught ones, can be VERY stubborn about eating.  Toads would be your best bet, but as you have seen they can be hard to find this time of year.  If you can't find a toad within a week I'd let it go.  And try and get yourself a captive born one already used to eating mice later on, they are very cool animals.  B