- Hey, good morning everybody
and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is absolutely amazing.
And my morning started over here at home,
at my incubator, with something awesome,
and that's the first little babies of the year hatched!
Look at this cute little monkey right here just in the egg.
I mean, that is amazing.
And then we have a little nose sticking out right here.
And of course, these are little Stimson's pythons.
I've talked about the pygmy Australian pythons,
which are in the genus Antaresia.
There're spotted spotted pythons,
there're Children's pythons,
there're of course Stimson's pythons,
and there's even anthill pythons, perthensis.
So these guys are the Stimson's,
which I absolutely love.
Last year was the first year we produced Stimson's pythons,
and these are incredible.
When I've spent time in Australia
these were the animals I loved.
I mean, I was so blown away,
so it's so cool to not only hatch
our first pythons of the year,
but to have them little pygmy Stimson's pythons.
I mean, how cute is that?
Now, these guys literally hatch in like 50, 52 days,
so they hatch a lot quicker than ball pythons,
which by the way I think we've got three days
till we cut our first ball python clutch.
I'll put a card right here of last year's egg cutting video
if you guys don't mind.
But literally these guys are just so absolutely incredible.
I mean, look at how cool.
And again, a little python.
They only get like three, three and a half foot,
something on that line,
so they don't get large at all
and they are just absolutely stunning.
These guys typically will go on to food here
in about seven to 10 days.
We'll give them two, three, four meals
before they go on the BHB website,
but wow those babies are cool.
That's it guys, the python season has officially started.
We have some baby pythons hatched out.
And again, we're just a few days away
from baby ball pythons too.
And we're still getting eggs,
that's what's absolutely incredible.
That is super, super cool.
That is the way my day started.
(door creaking)
Laurie, where you at?
(dramatic music)
Guess what?
(dramatic music)
- [Man] Target neutralized.
Fall back!
Grenade!
- Listen, listen, listen, okay, okay.
Okay, okay, okay.
I was just showing you
because I got the red balls,
which by the way says python and it's pretty cool.
This is for Matilda's training.
- Okay.
- So I'll get a stick, we'll put a stick on it,
and then can we start training this week?
- Yeah, you can.
- No, I want you to ...
It's your girl, I want you to train her.
Okay?
- Yeah, I'll work that into my schedule.
- Yes, it'll be exciting.
We'll have fun.
It'll be a family thing.
- Oh, okay.
Sounds good. - All right, thank you.
(laughs)
Kind of bad news guys.
I was bummed out to look,
but you know our little science project,
see through egg, you can tell it certainly
does not look good, right?
I mean, it doesn't look like the others,
so this egg definitely went bad,
so unfortunately we're not gonna be able
to watch this egg develop.
But, on a good note, you can really see
a little baby snake in this egg here,
and that egg still looks absolutely amazing,
so I think we're still gonna be able to see
the majority of an egg develop
in this spotted python clutch right here.
So that is pretty awesome.
It's cool, we actually had spotted pythons hatch today,
and now we get to see them develop in the egg.
I mean that is cool.
Unfortunately, our science project egg may have perished,
but the good news is we have a secondary backup
that is still gonna be super dope.
So I'll continue to update you on this thing.
It is looking so cool to be able to see
that snake in the egg like that.
And you can even see the snake inside the egg move around.
It kind of reminds me of that movie "Alien"
or something like that.
That is bizarre.
I have never seen anything like this in all of my years.
That is crazy.
(mellow funky music)
And it's python egg collecting time.
You're gonna hear a lot of that
over the next month or so for sure.
Of course, this is a beautiful little pinstripe ball python.
Really interesting kind of color to it,
and one of the reasons is it's actually
het for VPI and snow, and it's bred to
a double het VPI snow, so we could produce
some axanthic pinstripes, some snow pinstripes,
some albino pinstripes, all kinds of different stuff.
And ironically enough, we actually produced
the very first axanthic pinstripe many years ago,
so it's kind of a project that's near and dear.
Momma was just a sweetheart, I mean she's so nice.
And look at that big ol' pile of eggs right there.
Wow, I tell you what, that is piled high.
You aren't gonna see a clutch higher piled than that.
What was she thinking?
She's building a little castle to the heavens
I think with these eggs.
I tell you what, that's funny as heck.
But they really were laid just in the last little bit,
'cause I can tell how pliable they are.
They haven't even really hardened that much,
so getting them apart is super easy.
I'm just gonna peel these things off
just so that they're in the egg box
as good as they possibly can be,
and settle in and stuff like that,
'cause you don't want the top of the eggs
to be touching the bottom of the box,
because of course that's where condensation
kind of builds up and then you get wet eggs,
you can potentially have drowning and so on like that.
Regardless, two, four, six, eight, nine beautiful eggs.
Good job, momma, you did so good.
This next clutch was a pretty small pinstripe ball python,
but it's bred to a black pewter cypress,
and oh gosh, look it, she's got eggs all over the place.
Momma, what are you doing?
I'll show you the male it was bred to in a second,
but right now I'm gonna go ahead and get these eggs.
Obviously we're gonna have to candle them
because she didn't even coil them.
And every now and then you see that with ball pythons.
They'll just lay a clutch and just coil one or two eggs,
and the rest of the eggs are just all over the place.
Obviously if I wasn't able to get these eggs
out of here there's a very good chance
these eggs wouldn't hatch,
so I'm really not sure why they would do that
because in the wild this clutch would have
a very small chance of actually hatching.
But she had two, four, five beautiful eggs,
and for a little tiny girl like you momma
you did really well.
Again, beautiful snake.
We'll get her all cleaned up and ready to go,
and I will show you what that male
that she was bred to looks like.
Here's the daddy here.
Again, this is a black pewter cypress ball python.
The black pewter is actually a pastel and a black pastel,
and then the cypress just really cleans things up.
Just makes them really bright.
With some animals like Mojave it really creates
a really cool dorsal striping,
so this should be a pretty cool clutch
being that there's pastel, there's black pastel,
there's cypress, and there's pinstripe.
I know my guy Al Machino is as excited as I am
about having people back at The Reptarium.
Like I've been mentioning, we are opening up
and we are so excited about it,
but unfortunately Michigan rules says
that we can only have 10 people,
so we're timing time slots, okay?
4:00 to 5:00, 5:00 to 6:00, I've mentioned it before.
We are sold out the first weekend.
I think there might be one ticket left,
so thank you guys for an overwhelming response for this.
It's gonna be so amazing.
And again, because there's only 10 people
you're gonna get a lot of personalized attention for sure,
'cause 10 people in the entire Reptarium,
but unfortunately it is for only an hour.
We're selling the time slots for all of June
every weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday,
and then hopefully by July we'll have more people.
I think that by the middle of June
we may be able to go from 10 to 25.
Just waiting on the governor, we'll see what happens.
We'll add those time slots as needed
and so on like that.
But you can go to thereptarium.com, you can book that.
We're also starting to book private tours,
birthday parties, events that are under 10 people as well.
So you can reach out to us at any point.
We're starting to get there, guys.
We're starting to get there.
I'm pretty excited about it.
Toothless of course is an amazing animal,
and now that we're about to open up
we're making some of the changes
that we've been thinking about doing for a while now.
One of the things is we're actually gonna take
Toothless here and we're gonna move him
next to Elvis, where Ivy's cage used to be,
because Ivy's cage has been empty.
Of course we've been closed, so it's been no big deal.
Where are you going, monkey?
Now I'm trying to get him.
Where?
(grunting)
okay, I got to go on the floor
and see if he'll climb off.
Climb off, buddy.
Climb off.
There we go.
There we go, Toothless.
So now that we're opening we want to fill up the cages,
so we think we're gonna, in the next day or two,
move Toothless into Ivy's old case.
Look at all of the terracing and the places he can go.
He's gonna absolutely love it.
And then as he's getting bigger,
we can do the same thing that we do with Elvis
where we just let him crawl out on his own, right?
So we don't have to actually take him out,
we can just open the door, he can climb out
and hang out with us, because he is getting so much bigger.
What an absolutely wonderful animal.
I love him to death.
So that's gonna be something that happens
in the next day or two before we open.
Been working on a training thing with Ivy
just because I think it's interesting to see how she is.
And it's basically, let's just see if it works.
I'll go like this and I'll just tap, and she turns.
See?
As soon as I start tapping
she wants to know what's going on,
and oftentimes if I tap long enough and sit here long enough
she'll actually crawl right up to me.
It does take a little bit of time,
but I think that we'll continue to do this
over and over, you can see she's just gonna
kind of come over.
Hey, girl, what's going on?
And it's not a food aggression thing,
because she literally will climb right up to my hand
and stuff like that.
Good girl.
And I'm trying to do this every day
just to show her a little bit of interaction.
And again, you know what's weird?
She spent weeks, and weeks, and weeks in the water,
now she's on week two of on land.
Go figure.
What is this animal about?
I don't even know.
But I think it is pretty amazing
that she responds to the tapping part
and realizes it's me.
And then maybe I'll just touch her really quick
just so that we have this interaction
so she knows it's me.
I'll keep working on this,
and hopefully I can get to a point
at some point where I can tap,
she'll come right over a little bit quicker.
It'd be pretty cool.
And guess what time it is guys?
That's right, colubrid egg time.
This is actually a het scaleless corn,
and it's actually bred to this beautiful male right here
which is actually a hypo motley scaleless corn snake.
An absolutely ripper right there.
So let's hope for some good eggs.
Let's go ahead and pull this out
and we'll see what momma has going on.
It looks like an absolutely gorgeous clutch of eggs.
Again, she is just a normal corn snake
that is het for scaleless,
of course bred to that beautiful motley scaleless.
Oh my gosh, that's gonna be some beautiful babies.
We've got two, four, six, eight, ten,
11, 12 good eggs, no slugs.
That is a good clutch
and a great way to start colubrid egg collecting.
And you know what's pretty amazing, guys?
This clutch right here,
which is a het Nelson's milk snake,
just a beautiful Nelson's milk snake
that is het for albino, bred just to an albino,
is the hundredth colubrid clutch of the year.
That's right, we finally hit
the century mark of colubrid eggs.
Of course, we've got plenty more to go,
and it's a beautiful clutch.
Good way to hit that 100 mark for sure.
Two, four, six, eight, 10, 11 beautiful eggs.
Again, half of these on average will be albino,
half of them will be het for albino,
but we are up to 100 clutches.
Still have plenty more to go.
And again, we're gonna do
160, 170 ball python clutches alone,
so again, just a banger of a year.
It's been a lot of hard work.
If you guys don't realize it, everyone here at the crew,
Jessica, Laurie, myself, Bruce, Andrew,
everyone has been working so hard to produce
these snakes this year,
so it's nice when your hard work finally pays off.
This cage, of course, dedicated to by buddy Forrest Fanning
will have a croc monitor that comes from Zoo Dreams,
and my friends Desiree and Steve
down at Cold Blooded Cafe.
Talked with Desiree the other day,
she can't wait to get the croc monitor up here.
So now that we're open again,
we can start moving across state lines,
hopefully soon we can get that animal.
It will be absolutely amazing.
But just waiting for that thing, it's gonna be incredible.
But we do have a lot of work to get back to it,
like I had mentioned.
One of the rooms that I have to really work on today
is the snake massage room.
There's only one snake in the entire place right now,
but I want to finish this wall off right here
just to get that done.
Laurie's gonna have come back,
do a ton of seaming all over the place.
Not sure we're gonna get that done today,
but definitely gonna get a crack at that.
At least trying to finish out this rock wall
for the snake massage room,
get this place looking at least good.
Even though we can't do snake massages right now
because obviously human touch and so on like that,
I want the place to look good.
So I'll work on that a little bit today.
(mellow funky music)
(whirring) (clicking)
(mellow funky music)
(clicking)
(mellow funky music)
(clicking)
(mellow funky music)
More or less I have this all finished up right now.
Obviously Laurie has to go and blend everything together.
Laurie has a lot of work, I'm not gonna lie.
Out of everyone getting back to the punches
of getting this place ready in tip top finish,
Laurie has the worst part of it
because she has so much work.
All these seams, everything you see here
has to be gone over in silicon, and dusted,
and stuff like that.
It's gonna take her some time,
but it's not like we have to be done when we open this time,
but definitely now that we're open again
we got to get back to getting this place done.
Pretty cool to have the first
pythons of the year hatching out.
Of course, in a couple days
we cut the first ball python clutches,
so it's heating up guys.
We've had eggs coming,
and now we're gonna have babies coming.
It is incredible.
If you want, you can actually hit this playlist right here
and you can see a bunch of baby snakes
that hatched last year and years before.
You can also please show my podcast some love
right up here, it's called Checking In.
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Have a wonderful day.
Remember, be kind to someone,
and I promise I'll see you tomorrow.