- Hey good morning everybody, and welcome to the vlog.
I hope your day is as good as it possibly can be today.
I am about to just give you 15 minutes where you can just
forget about everything else and just
have a good time with us.
Lori is here because Jay is still out sick,
no worries, wish him best in the comments,
but he's getting better, he's not got a terrible thing,
just a little bit of a head virus thing.
He felt great today but I told him,
just give him one more day,
let's go ahead and get this thing out of there,
so Jay'll be back tomorrow, in the mean time,
you've got myself and Lori,
and Bruce and Jessica are here too.
I'm gonna hand the camera off to Lori here
and I'm gonna follow me this way.
Again now we wanna just get a little socialization
on these iguanas, and I wanted to give you
a little update on how Hines the crimson albino
that lost it's tail is actually doing.
And you can see he's doing very, very well,
chunky as could be.
When an iguana loses its tail
the problem can be is that they can stress out
and stop eating, and that's when they're a problem.
This guy is just a little chubber
and chowing down food a lot.
But we're continuing to try to habituate him.
And if you notice how I'm trying to handle this,
I'm not grabbing him, I'm not restraining him,
I'm slowly letting him go and you can see,
in just no time, he actually calms down.
That's how you actually work with monitor lizards,
with iguanas, and most other lizards,
and even crocodilians, is you never wanna restrain them,
you want them to feel like it's their thing,
and just slowly work with them.
And over time, he's gonna continue to say,
"Oh that wasn't that bad" and he's gonna
get tamer and tamer.
So as this guy has his tail growing back,
and his tail will probably grow back mostly,
it'll be a little bit different color,
it won't be as bright, unfortunately,
but you can even see a little bit of a nub
right there where it's already starting to grow,
only after a couple days, which is really good,
and I just wanted to update you on the fact
that it's doing so well.
It's eating, you can see how chubby it is,
and again the habituation with me socializing him
is something that I'm so excited about.
You can see how just in a matter of minutes,
how absolutely calm this guys gets.
And you can kinda use that technique to do a lot of things.
Now some things don't calm down as quick as this guy does,
but the goal in the future is to get to a point
where he doesn't freak out at all,
I can just lift him up and take him right out,
and he calms down, and that's again,
like I've been mentioning in the last couple of vlogs
about creating threads of amazing experiences
for these animals and I couldn't be more happy
with how beautiful Hines here is,
even though he doesn't have a tail right now,
like I said, it'll grow back,
and he is a wonderful animal.
Look like you've got some help today, huh Lori?
- Well kind of, I guess you could call her help.
- [Brian] Is she gonna be cleaning and feeding?
- Yes she's gonna be getting in my way,
is what she's gonna be doing.
- I think she wants some attention from momma.
Well business as usual here, you know,
things don't stop no matter what's going on,
so obviously you have colubrid work today,
what are you doing?
- Yes, I fed yesterday, so I'm going through spot cleaning,
you know, keeping track, looking at stuff,
getting a game plan 'cause next week
we start putting males and females together.
So I'm actually pretty excited.
I organized them all the other day,
so I got my groups together.
- [Brian] How's things looking, good?
- Yeah, actually things look really good,
we got a lot of stuff up that we didn't have last year.
- [Brian] Oh some new stuff?
- Yeah, we've got some Cal kings and some different stuff
that is, I'm excited to start breeding.
- [Brian] Oh here comes your other dog.
- Yes, yes, that's my pain in the butt two,
this is one, this is two.
- That's her two pains in the butt.
And for people that don't know, I mean,
these guys don't seem to even mind each other,
I mean, you know, they just kind of ignore each other.
You can see Speedy's just walking on through,
and Phoebe's just interested in getting
attention from momma, so,
all right I'll let you get to work,
I know you got a lot to do.
(upbeat techno music)
Come on Speedy, let's go, get in here, come on,
keep going buddy, keep going, keep going.
Thank you.
I told you, I been training this guy.
He went into the offices, I told him let's go,
and get over here, and now he's just coming over
and hanging out, so, I tell you,
you can train a tortoise, I'm telling you,
I'm gonna have this thing doing tricks
by the end of the summer.
Take a look at these mossy frogs right here.
They're so absolutely adorable.
There's actually four of them in here,
oh there's another one right over,
oh there's two of them,
there's one right here and then one right over here.
So there's four mossy frogs in here,
and I love this whole enclosure.
It's just really cool, I mean,
they're neat little animals for sure,
and then of course I wanted to show you
my little emerald tree boa baby that's doing really well,
eating and just crushing it, so that's really cool.
And again, that's one of the things that
I'm loving right now is spending even more time
just kind of hanging out with the animals, you know?
I'm usually so busy with all the events that we do,
and obviously being open at the Reptarium,
I miss it, I miss it more than I could ever tell you,
but it does give me time to kind of just enjoy things
a little bit more here without all the hustle and bustle
of thing, I mean, look at Perdida,
how absolutely incredible she is.
But I did wanna ask you guys,
I don't know if you know this about me,
but I don't watch TV, like I haven't watched a series
in forever, I take that back,
I actually did watch one series recently,
on Netflix, called Lock and Key,
which was absolutely,
it's the first series I've probably watched in five years.
I need your advice, and other people might too,
down in the comments let me know, like,
a great Netflix series or Amazon,
whatever you watch, let me know what I can start watching.
I'm gonna try to see if I can spend some time
with my family watching something,
as well as maybe people in the comments
can read through and together we can decide
what we can watch, and who knows?
Maybe I'll give you an update on how I feel about things.
I just need to mentally get through this,
'cause you gotta remember guys,
I am a person that stays busy all the time.
I'm a person that stays busy all of the time,
so having any idle time isn't really good for me mentally.
So help me out with what I should watch.
Down here with the ball python,
course this is a pastel chocolate ball python,
and it's bred to a banana chocolate spinner,
which means that there's chance for the Barney ball.
Well the truth is we have so many
gravid ball pythons right now it's absolutely incredible.
As a matter of fact,
this is the banana chocolate spinner here,
and this is actually a chocolate king spin,
which is a spider, a pinstripe, a lesser, and a pastel.
And Mary did such a great job of working on these animals
and getting them into a position
where there's a big majority of them that were gravid.
Course I've been excited, I'm not gonna lie,
to get in here and actually work with these guys.
Of course this is just a big pastel
and a woma lesser pinstripe,
and I get to kind of finish the ball python breeding season.
But don't think that I'm not gonna appreciate
everything that Mary did for it.
This is just an enchi ball python,
and again, it's just blowing up.
If you look through here, all these check marks?
Check marks, done, check marks, check marks,
check mark, check marks, check marks, all these,
those are the animals that I'm basically
almost done breeding or at a point where I believe
they will go no matter what happens, you know?
Whether I breed them or not, they're probably gonna go,
because they're in advance of 22, 24 millimeters.
This is actually an enchi het piebald
that's bred to a pastel piebald ball python,
so I can get some pastel enchi piebalds,
I mean, it just goes on, you know?
Look at, this is actually a calendar,
which is a calico spider ball python.
It's not a really big animal,
but you can see that bowl wrapping,
that's a really good example of, like,
cool seeking, bowl wrapping,
which usually means animals are gearing up for an ovulation.
So again, it's gonna be an amazing year,
and it's been so much fun for me to get back in here,
spend daily time with these animals,
finishing out the breeding season,
I cannot believe egg season is just literally
within a week or two we'll have our first clutches.
So I've gotta get through all these animals,
get some males switched around, and just check everything.
It's been a lot of fun, guys,
so as much as I'm sad to see Eric and Mary moving on,
it's given me an opportunity to kind of reconnect
with these animals and finish out the breeding season.
(jazzy techno music)
Trying to spend as much time as I can
just appreciating the beauty of the animals
that we're working with these days.
And with this little slow down it's given me the opportunity
to take a little bit of a breath
and just realize how lucky I am
to spend time around these amazing animals.
Of course this is a gray banded king snake.
Now this is the Alterna phase,
which just basically means that it has
either little to no red on it.
Now sometimes they'll have like,
skinny black bands and then skinny red bands,
and then that can be alternating.
And that might even be why they call them Alterna.
You can see this guy just has a little bit of red
on his neck, but other than that,
it's pretty much just black and gray.
And then of course this is what they would call
the Blairs phase, which is that big orange banding
with the triads of black that band around them.
Both are absolutely amazing and they're from west Texas,
they're a king snake, unbelievably cool.
Now the only problem is is sometimes these guys
are lizard eaters when they're babies,
so they can be a little tricky to get going.
But once they get on to rodents,
they are absolutely bullet proof and amazing animals.
We have some adults up to size to produce this year,
this is the first time we probably have produced
gray banded kings, or well,
hopefully will produce gray banded kings,
in probably about eight or nine years.
So I'm pretty excited about the potential.
Kind of excited because today is actually
my first virtual tours.
And what I mean is we're gonna actually do some
virtual tours here where you know,
and for those of you guys that are wondering like,
what in the heck are you talking about, virtual tours?
Basically it's a FaceTime, it's a Skype,
it's a Zoom, whatever platform we need to use
to kind of connect with you guys,
and you get me one on one, I mean,
or however many people on your end, but it's just us.
We walk around, we look at animals,
I talk, I can answer questions abour your breeding,
or what you should get, or if you have an issue.
It's just an hour with me and showing off the Reptarium,
and I think it's gonna be a really fun thing to do.
So we have two of them to do today.
(jazzy techno music)
Just wrapped up those two virtual tours,
definitely gonna take me some time to kinda get used to it.
It was a lot of fun, the first one was a family,
thank you guys, if you're watching.
It was a lot of fun,
we did a Skype where we were up on a TV,
it was a little bit complicated
because we had to have them talk to Lori,
then Lori convey to me because we had an echo,
but we had a great time.
And then the second one was just a FaceTime, super fun.
By the way, Ivy is opaque,
so she's in shed, and she's in the water,
I'm very curious what she's gonna do next, right?
Is she gonna stay in the water to shed,
is she gonna come out to shed?
Obviously I think she's gonna shed pretty well,
'cause she's obviously very moist,
'cause she's been in the water, but it's pretty interesting.
All these new things that we're experiencing
at the Reptarium for the very first time, you know?
How the animals are doing, I mean like,
again, Cupcake is down now,
but she's half the time is up in here, which blows me away.
By the way, Darwin, the centralian, again,
when it was over at the other Reptarium
didn't eat for like two months,
then started eating, and then we moved it back to BHB
because we just replaced it with,
actually Toothless, believe it or not.
But it's eating now already in the first week.
Again, we had Al Machino,
he ate finally after about three weeks of being over here,
so it's an interesting thing just to kinda
learn this stuff and see how things are reacting,
and so far it's been overwhelmingly good.
As a matter of fact, I'm trying to think if there's
anything left, oh you know what,
there is, the only two animals that didn't eat this week
were the black headed pythons.
But ironically enough, both of them,
which by the way, look at them just cruising around,
I mean, they are so cool.
But both of them are actually going into shed right now,
so hopefully when they shed, they'll eat.
But other than that, every animal over here is now eating
and doing well, so that's pretty awesome.
Oh by the way, really quick,
Eric and Noah, and I was jumping in for a little bit,
actually are downstairs doing a podcast right now,
so I'll put a link in the description,
you can watch that podcast, it was really fun.
I joined them for about half it, they're still going.
So it's always fun to have Eric and Noah together.
It's actually pretty beautiful out here,
the sun is starting to go down.
It's been a long day of work, but it's been amazing,
and I'm so thankful that I get to not only
share my life with you guys,
but also get to do something that I truly love,
and it definitely keeps me busy in these times,
and I'm thankful for that,
and again, wanna be here as much as I can for you guys.
And again I don't wanna just keep on bringing it up,
but let me know what else I can do for you guys.
Let me know in the comments what you would like to see
over the coming days, because we can't travel,
we can't really adventure, so we have to be here,
so I wanna know what you guys wanna see from me,
so that I can help take your mind off of
the things in life, and remember guys,
it's not gonna be easy, but we're going to get through this.
We will get to the other side,
and if we can do it together without trying to create
toxic communities and negativity,
do you the best you can do to enjoy the things.
Enjoy your family, your friends,
your animals, all those things,
and together we will get to the other side of this.
So thank you for joining me,
and thank you for all of your support.
Stay safe out there, I love you guys so much.
Like I mentioned before, did a podcast today,
do a podcast at least twice a week.
Right over here you can subscribe to it,
it's called Checking In.
You can roll through an entire playlist right here.
On this side you can subscribe to the vlog channel.
Turn the post notifications on,
Jay will be back tomorrow so the videos'll get
a little bit better again, I apologize about that.
Have an absolutely wonderful day,
or the best you possibly can, I'm here for you guys,
and I love you, and I will see you tomorrow.