Hey, good morning everybody and welcome to the vlog.
I am down here in the dungeon at BHB.
Uh, good morning Archie, how are you today?
And I am not gonna be talking about my pet alligator.
I am so
excited
right now, because
I was just going through the Skinks and guess what?
The first babies.
Oh my god!
The first babies of the year.
Oh my gosh.
Mamma looks like she definitely had a bunch,
as she is beat up right now.
That is for sure.
This is a beautiful red female bred to a red male
and like I said,
looks like she has got some taken out of her,
because she is usually a nice, big, fat animal.
I do wanna start by saying that I am gonna be doing
a big upgrade to our Skink breeding.
You know, I tell you what,
we have been keeping them this way for the last few years.
I have said this year we wanna kinda go to something
with like UV light, much larger and stuff like that.
I was hoping to do that this summer,
I still hope I can get there.
Obviously things are a little bit weird right now,
as you guys know,
but regardless looking to upgrade
these which is a huge priority,
but in the meantime lets just go ahead
and get mamma out of here.
So I can look and see how many babies there are.
Woo, doggy.
I tell you right, these things are so cute.
All right, so lets go collect these.
Again this is red Northern Blue Tongues
to red Northern Blue Tongues.
So these babies should be ridiculous
and oh my god, look at how feisty and fast they are.
They are so,
oh, oh my god.
They are so adorable.
Look at those little monkeys right there.
Oh there is one right over here.
Hey, come on little buddy.
Oh my god.
I love little baby Skinks and these are big babies too.
You can see why mamma looked like she was so beat up,
I mean those things are gonna be ridiculous
and when they start to color up.
Oh my gosh these guys are gonna be good.
Look at how cool their,
I love when they stick their tongue out as babies,
they are just like I am big and I am bad,
but lets see how many she has.
She only has four so far,
oh here is another one, right here.
Oh, here we go.
Look at this , gosh, look at these things
and look at how feisty that little monkey is right there.
I love these guys.
Oh look it, there is a couple more.
There is one right, oh come on little buddy.
Oh this is a nice litter.
What a way to start the year.
Oh my gosh, these things are so incredible
and like I said, really beautiful animals.
Just kinda looking around here in
the bedding to see if I have missed any other ones.
Oh, here is another one right over here, oh here we go.
Come on,
oh my gosh what a tub of absolute amazingness right here.
Just gotta again go through.
Looks like that might be it.
I will just look through here really quick,
make sure there is nothing over here.
Nope, looks like that is it.
So what did we have?
We had two, four, six, eight little beautiful baby Skinks.
Take a look at those monkeys right there.
Oh my gosh, and the color is ridiculous.
Of course Blue Tongued Skinks,
as they get older get more and more beautiful,
but those guys are good
and these are really nice size babies.
A lot of the times the babies are like half the size,
but just take a look at these, wow!
Oh my god, that is the most adorable thing
and these guys grow so quick.
They are gonna go from this size
to like half grown just in like three or four months.
It is ridiculous how much Skinks grow,
but I could not be more happy
with eight little beautiful healthy babies
and they all seem very vibrant, very going,
because sometimes you have litters where they
are actually a little listless.
Most of them will eventually pick up.
These guys look so incredibly lively.
Oh my god.
First baby Blue Tongued Skinks of the year.
And of course Jessica
is the one that breeds all these things.
So lets go ahead,
show her some of her babies for all her hard work.
All right we are gonna go find Jessica.
Jessica, guess what I got for you?
- Is it Skinks?
It is living Skinks, take a look.
They are pretty ones too.
- Oh look at you guys.
I love them,
they are always, they are so tiny they make me smile
- [Brian] I know and these are good ones,
these are from the red, red female bred to a red male.
- Oh
- [Brian] So they should be really good ones
- So hopefully they are nice and red.
- [Brian] I know, so those are the first babies of the year.
- That is so awesome
- [Brian] Good job,
I knew you would be excited to see them so
- Yay
- [Brian] So hopefully we will have
a bunch more here coming soon,
but they are awesome are they not?
- [Jessica] Yes, so pretty.
(Laughs cheerfully)
(lighthearted music)
- Just one clutch of Ball Pythons today,
but I am gonna be honest with you
it does not look like it is gonna be a very good clutch.
This is actually a Pinstriped female
and I took a little peek at it,
looked like there were some infertile eggs.
That happens, there is not much I can do about it.
And this is the male it was actually bred to,
which is a Banana Fire Pinstriped,
an absolutely beautiful male,
but he is a first year male, never fathered clutches before
and this is his first clutch.
Now I did breed him to a few other females,
so lets hope the other females
have better fertility than this one,
but lets just go ahead
and take a look and see what this mom has.
It is okay mom,
and she is a beautiful snake too.
Aw.
Well it looks like we have got
a couple little good eggs in there,
it is a little bit better than I expected.
I thought it was gonna all be slugs,
but listen that happens
and like I always tell you I take you guys
on the entire journey of the entire year,
not just what is good.
I am gonna put theses two eggs here.
Definitely gonna need to candle them,
see this little bit of paper on here that tells me
that it probably rolled, the same thing happened here.
So we will candle those and see what is going on.
We got two good eggs and two, four, six, eight slugs.
So that would have been a ten egg clutch,
but hey listen that happened
and like I had mentioned,
I wanted to tell you guys how it is
to actually breed these animals.
Typically
we have about a 92 to 94 percent rate of fertility,
but that means that you are gonna have somewhere between,
you know four and eight percent,
maybe on any course or year.
We have had years where
we have had like 20 percent fertility issues,
so this year I am sure that is not gonna happen.
The animals look really good,
but hey that is part of breeding animals.
Could be a whole host
of reasons why you would have infertile.
Could be the male, could be the female,
could be temperature, could be just timing,
whatever happens,
regardless we do have two beautiful eggs
and I am happy for whatever I get.
(Chilled music)
- I wanted to actually show you guys a couple little things
that I have actually taught these guys.
I got Chomper and a couple other guys that do,
do a couple little tricks here and there.
A little bit more than just the clicker stuff.
Allie, you are trying to eat me, are you not?
I can just, you can feel them can you not?
What I am hoping is that everything I have taught these guys
we will teach the smaller guys,
so when the time the little guys are this age,
they are going to be a lot nicer,
they are gonna be a lot cooler,
they are gonna maybe be a little more apt
to do a little few more different things
and maybe,
maybe you can get to the part where they are almost like RJ,
where you can actually hand them to
people without taping them around their mouth
or they are actually really cool to hold and touch.
Oh, oh
Good job, good job.
All right.
The idea here is I do not want him
to go forward like that happening, I want him to go up,
because when he goes up
he is gonna have to work for it a little bit
and therefore I can kinda,
kinda work my hand a little bit
and keep my hand out of the danger zone.
So lets try it again,
come here, and up
and up
and up and up,
up,
up
oh there ya go,
yes, dude that is so awesome.
No idea that he would even do that,
so I am so excited that he is too,
because that really opens up a lot of other stuff for him
and actually he really motivates me to really wanna
get one of those little guys to do the same thing.
Believe it or not it actually only took me
about two maybe three months to really get these guys,
especially him down, down to be like this.
I know he is food motivated and I,
I knew for a fact that there was some things like that,
that they already did naturally,
so I just encouraged those things
and I wanted to push that even further,
so I am hoping to do the same thing
with the rest of these guys.
(lighthearted music)
To be honest with you,
I would not even consider this necessarily
as a failed attempt.
This is, um, this is still an opportunity
that I am able to be able to hold
one of our alligators here.
Number one, it is rewarding not only for me,
but for this guy.
It is stimulants for him
and we and this is the purpose we got him for,
you know, we got him,
because they are cute little babies
and they are not gonna do a lot of damage to you
if they do get a hold of you.
These little things like this are still improving something,
they are still doing something,
so it is never, it is never a failed attempt
it is always just moving forward.
- Guess what time?
It is colubrid egg time.
Gosh I need that bumper right there with that blues clue,
someone please make that for me.
This is actually a really cool little animal right here.
This is a Corn snake
that is actually a Kitsatchie that looks really cool.
Oh it just bit me.
Mamma what is the matter with you?
You are okay.
We will clean her up, get her some water.
Looks like her clutch was not
that good to be honest with you.
It is kinda all over the place really,
so I am just gonna set these up.
I am gonna have to candle all of these eggs,
because uh looks like there is a couple slugs
and then the rest look like good eggs,
but not a really big clutch.
Of course the Kisatchie rats
are really similar to Corn snakes,
but uh they are a little bit different
and they typically have a little bit less eggs as well.
Two, four, six, seven good egss.
It looks like two little sluggers.
I will candle these up and move on to the next clutch.
This is a really cool animal
It is a Tessera het scaleless bred to a beautiful scaleless,
but last year she laid slugs.
So I am a little bit nervous,
because a lot of times that can be a female thing,
so what will happen?
Will I have good eggs or will I have slugs this year?
Ah, looks like they are actually pretty good.
Look at how gorgeous that snake is though.
Definitely not a full clutch of good eggs,
but man I tell you what
that is a ripper of a snake.
Lets go ahead
and just take a look and see what we actually do have here.
Like I said all in all not a bad clutch,
there is definitely a few slugs in here,
but pretty much
it is pretty good considering last year were all slugs.
I will take it for sure.
Looks like we just have three little sluggers here
and the rest look good,
so we got two, four, six good eggs,
three little slugs.
I tell you what, that is awesome.
Tesseras that cool pattern mutation
and then of course the fact that its het scale
was bred to a scaleless we could produce
some scaleless Tesseras which are absolutely incredible.
I have mentioned how it is really important
to get these fertile,
because Red Eared Sliders and Map Turtles
kinda habituated to people feeding them,
because we wanna let kids actually come up
and tong feed them with you know worms or super worms
or pieces of fish or whatever the case may be.
So I am gonna go ahead and just try to see if
I can get these guys to keep coming up
and we will keep training these guys to
where you know it does not take long for these guys
to get really smart and as you have seen right off the bat
they are coming up, they wanna take it.
Yup, there it goes, there it is
and that is the thing.
See now all of them are like oh wait a second,
we can come up and get food
and if we do this everyday like this,
keep on handing them food,
keep on habituating them and socializing like that.
The sooner they start relating us to food,
then every time they see us
they are gonna come up to the surface just like this
and take food all the time.
You can see they are coming up like crazy now,
it is almost like it is spreading through the community.
They are saying hey you can go over here to get food
and that is gonna be really cool.
That way when kids actually come up they will always come up
and actually feed them,
so this is giving us some time to kinda train these guys
and I think within the next couple of weeks
every time we walk up to the edge of this pond
all the turtles are gonna come over,
because they are gonna wanna get fed.
I know I have talked about the Amazon basin,
beautiful enclosure.
I love this enclosure, but it just was not eating in there,
so what we have to do is actually put it into this enclosure
every time we are gonna feed it,
so usually the night before we transfer it in to here,
we offer it food,
it eats and then we put it back in the other enclosure.
So lets go ahead and see if this little monkey will eat,
unfortunately we do have to feed it live fuzzies,
so we are not gonna show that part of it,
but uh once it is actually eating
maybe we will show you that,
because it is pretty epic.
(chilled music)
- We are doing a little bit of an experiment today
Uh I am kinda trying to see how far
we can sorta push our luck with Beetle Juice.
We are gonna try and see if he comes out
and we are actually gonna try and pet him,
little bit maybe right here under the chin
and that is really all they care about.
So he is already starting to look a little curious,
because he is already hearing me talking, getting excited.
So I am gonna put my hand up right here,
see if I can get him up there.
(chilled music)
You looking at my hand like it is food buddy.
Num, num.
Good boy , you all right, you okay,
you okay
Why are you looking at my hand like you are about to nip it?
Leave my finger.
Its all right, he is getting a little scared.
Might have pushed my luck a little bit with him,
so like he was obviously still food motivated enough
to wanna come out,
maybe not necessarily food motivated enough
for us to do a little chin touch.
So I, I think it, think it still was a lot of progress,
still think that is a lot of positive interaction there.
He did not really necessarily react too badly,
too negatively.
If you guys had noticed
I actually even tried to touch his hand a little bit.
By desensitizing these little touches.
I am using Jessica as a puppet, I am sorry,
but like by using these weir little touches hopefully,
hopefully he will actually like you know
stop caring about it basically.
- This is another ripper of a Corn snake.
Exciting clutch right here.
I hope it is going to bed good,
because this is actually a hypo ocato abit
bred through an abits ocato scaleless
and oh my god those are some big eggs
and they look good.
Looks like maybe one bad egg in there,
but other than that, beautiful big eggs too.
I tell you what who
I tell you that is a beautiful clutch.
Lets go ahead and get these guys set up,
we will count them
and just take a look at how amazing that is, wow.
So that is two, four, six, eight, ten, eleven good eggs,
one slugger
and the male it is bred to is unbelievable,
lets take a look.
Just take a look at that right there,
oh my god.
That is an insane snake,
so again that is the dad to that clutch, wow.
There is going to be some amazing babies
from there for sure.
How amazing to have little baby Skinks
and we have got a bunch of other litters coming,
so it is going to be absolutely incredible.
Baby season is upon us, at least with Skinks,
not too far off from snake babies.
As for a matter of fact you can check out
this playlist right here.
A bunch of baby snakes,
uh get your fix before we start hatching them.
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could you show my podcast some love right up here,
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check it out.
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Thank you for your support,
have an absolutely wonderful day,
remember be kind to someone
and I promise I will see you tomorrow.