- Hey, good morning everybody and welcome to the vlog.
How is the start of your day?
I hope it's absolutely incredible.
We're actually gonna do a little work
with my guy Night Fury here.
Of course Night Fury is an absolutely gorgeous snake
but you can see, as soon as I open the cage
it is very, very food aggressive.
If you get close to that animal,
unfortunately it will try to bite you.
Not because it's an aggressive snake,
it's unbelievably tame but it is super food aggressive,
as a matter of fact last week
while I was trying to kind of calm it down
to where it was like, "Hey, I'm not food."
It did bite me,
and you can see he's right out at the cage right now.
If I put hand close enough,
he would absolutely come right at it for sure.
See, he is seeking food right now,
he thinks he's gonna get fed.
So the idea behind this is
and I'm gonna have to slowly try to
get him back in the cage without getting bit.
It's okay, Night Fury, no food, no food.
Again, unbelievably beautiful and unbelievably tame animal
but again, look it, right up at the front of the cage,
like "Feed me, feed me!"
So we need to take that away, right,
we've done that with the monitor lizard
and some of our alligators
where we actually use either clickers or ball training.
So I tell you what, I'm gonna go ahead
and start this kinda long process
of ball training or target training Night Fury.
And basically what I'm gonna do is
I'm just gonna take a ball at the end of a stick,
just like I do my lizards,
I'm gonna present it to him
and then afterwards I'm gonna go ahead and feed him a meal
and that hopefully over time will start having him
relating that ball to food and not our hands to food.
And we certainly have proven that
snakes and reptiles are kinda creatures of habits,
take for instance Lucy.
Every time I put her back, what does she do,
she goes right up in her tree.
Tazi goes home on his own.
So many of these animals do the exact same thing
every single time that we interact with them,
so we can use that to our advantage
by using a ball as a training tool, right,
so every time it sees the ball
it starts to think ball equals food,
and when it doesn't see the ball,
it doesn't think there's food.
That will protect us,
it will protect everyone else that's handling it,
and if it works with Night Fury
we might take this across all of our snakes, I don't know.
So what do you say we just jump in,
get some food for Night Fury and try this ball thing?
The first time isn't gonna be a lot,
but it's at least gonna be the start
of a long process of training
and hopefully in a few months from now
he can follow that ball around just like Elvis would.
So I have my handy dandy ball here
on the end of the stick,
probably gonna replace these pretty soon
because they're getting a little bit dingy
but we want a blue ball.
Again, he's probably not gonna
relate this blue ball to anything
but he is gonna relate movement,
so if I do this four, five, six, seven times
over the next couple months,
then he's gonna start to relate this ball to food.
So let's just go ahead, open him up first,
and again he's gonna be fired up and ready to eat.
Come on bud.
And he's gonna just go after movement right now,
so if I can catch, he's coming over to movement,
he's just looking at movement, movement,
movement, movement, movement,
now I'm gonna offer him food.
There it goes.
Now, the association is that that ball was food.
I follow the ball, I get food, right.
And that's what we're trying to build.
We're trying to build that experience with him.
Again, he's not gonna get it the first time
but you can see how he reacted to movement,
went right towards the ball,
then when I gave him the reward of food,
within the next four or six times of feeding,
he's gonna start relating this every single time.
The good news about that is
we're taking away the fact that
when we move our hand around he doesn't see the ball,
so he's not gonna think our hand is food,
we're just trying to take away that food response
and then we can maybe do some other cool things with him,
maybe we can get him to come out
and go around people's necks,
I mean who knows what we could do.
Probably a bad idea to be honest with you,
but the point is is that once we get him ball trained,
it opens up the opportunities to do a lot of other things.
Let's just go ahead
and let Night Fury enjoy his reward
for being such a good monkey.
(upbeat music)
Guess what guys, I am so excited,
remember the last four days or so
I've been waiting for this girl,
this is that pastel female
that was bred to that beautiful male and look at this.
She's on a clutch of eggs right now.
I'm excited about this.
I'll show you that male really quick
just so you know what I'm talking about and why I'm excited.
And here he is, of course he is a pastel,
he's a black pastel, he's a lesser and he's a bongo,
so that's some amazing combinations there,
and again, throwing that second pastel gene in
could get super pastels of all these things,
I am so excited,
I was worried like, "When is she gonna lay?"
So let's go ahead and pull this clutch
and see how many eggs she has.
And like I mentioned you know,
not every female has to be
an unbelievably crazy mutation female.
Sometimes a single gene animal
like a pastel when it's bred to the right male
can really make some incredible offspring.
So I'm just gonna remove mama,
you did such a good job, mom.
I tell you what, these are beautiful eggs
and now I'll just remove these couple eggs over here
because they're not attached to the rest of them,
you can see they're already
adhered to the bottom of that paper.
That just means they were probably laid a few hours ago
and are starting to dry up,
but you can tell they're still relatively fresh eggs,
probably within the last six hours or so,
which means that they're not quite completely dried yet.
So I'm gonna put these eggs in here,
we'll get these last eggs over here,
just slowly peel them off the bottom here,
just really quickly.
Okay, these three here.
Come on guys.
Get these in the box,
and then these last eggs right here.
And mama's being really well-behaved, you know,
so many of these females have been
taking pop shots at me as I'm pulling their eggs.
Which is just the good maternal instincts for sure,
but in this case she's being really well-behaved
and she has a total of
two, four, six, eight beautiful pearly white eggs.
Again, the combinations are so many with this,
I hope we produce a bunch of bongo stuff.
Because bongo stuff is so cool
and the lesser bongo stuff even better,
you start mixing it with black pastel
and pastel and super pastel, hoo!
I tell you what, that's awesome.
Just a quick update on my female translucent chameleon here,
she's definitely swelling up.
We had Raul in with her a couple times,
you don't know if they bred or not.
She's the girl that laid 52 slugs,
but you can definitely see she's starting to swell up.
Also, she's got all those black spots on here.
That's a pretty good indication that
she's gravid as well so,
we'll have to just fingers cross,
hopefully this time maybe we'll get some fertile eggs.
Ivy looks extra nice this shed.
I don't know what it is,
I don't know if it's just the water is really cleaned up
or what the deal is but she looks she even more beautiful.
All the orange coming through,
and even that highlights in her side look absolutely insane.
I'm gonna feed her probably a smaller meal this time,
maybe in the next day or two
we'll go ahead and offer her a meal,
something that's maybe a three or four pounds
because remember, I was running a cycle, right,
I wanna do two, three, four meals small,
one big meal with her.
So she's due for a handful of small meals.
Casper is definitely another animal
that ball training would be very helpful with
because we all know that this guy is crazy
when it comes to food.
And I think he's, bro!
He's pretty hungry right now, so let's go ahead.
Whoa, geez!
Man, that was a little closer
to my hand than I wanted it to be for sure.
You can see he missed by a good six inches or so.
My hand was only about six inches away from that,
so ball training with Casper is number two.
If it works for Night Fury which I sure hope it does,
we're gonna go into Casper 100% because this guys is mental.
(upbeat music)
Check out this clutch right here.
This is actually a greenish rat snake.
These are an interesting rat snake
and I just, I don't know, I love these guys.
I don't know why I love greenish rats so much,
but I just really do.
I just think it's because these guys
you'll find down in the southeast part of the country
and I've seen these in the wild
and maybe I just have
a special love for them because of that,
but nevertheless let's see what she has in here.
Interestingly enough,
you can see these eggs look kinda dirty
and that's because she kinda
rolled them around a little bit.
We're definitely gonna have to candle these eggs
and see what she's got going on in here
but they look good,
so they're not that pearly white that most eggs
but it's not because they look infertile,
it's because they actually are
stained from this bedding that we use
for nesting right here,
and it's just because rat snakes
sometimes don't clump their eggs into a big clump,
they'll actually lay them
and then they'll move them around a little bit,
that's why it's so important for us to candle them,
because of course there's a chance
the embryos could always drown on the other side,
but there's a lot more eggs in here than I expected.
I thought it was gonna be a relatively small clutch
and the eggs just keep coming, holy moley,
look at how many eggs there are.
Good job, mama.
You did so good.
Let's see here, we got, let's see, a couple more eggs.
And like I said, I'll take these in
and actually candle all of these eggs to be honest with you,
just to make sure the embryos are on the upside
but this is actually a really beautiful clutch right here.
Oh, there's one little slug egg right there.
And you can definitely tell the difference
between a slug egg that is definitely discolored
and even though these are discolored,
the egg still looks tremendously different, right.
So it looks like we got two, four, six, eight,
10, 12, 14, 15 good eggs and one little slugger.
- What is going on everybody,
as you guys know, Brian's been doing
a lot of the ball python breeding
and man we had a hell of a good week this past week,
but that being said of course with breeding of animals
there's always some unfortunate parts of this.
So we're gonna make the best out of a bad situation,
we're gonna take these sweet little slugs right here,
we're gonna give these a little extra protein,
a little extra enrichment for our monitors today
and man they are gonna love it,
and we're gonna have some,
oh, it's gonna be such a great time.
Let's do this.
(upbeat music)
Wow, holy cow!
Did you guys see that drip, that was so crazy!
You know you go into a lot of animal feedings
and you have sort of like your own speculations,
things that you just sort of assume that we're gonna happen,
and I was completely wrong.
I completely went off the other end, I was thinking,
"I'm gonna have a lot to mop and clean up,
there's gonna be fluid everywhere,
it's gonna smell horribly or he's gonna yell at me,
it's gonna be the best ever."
So that didn't happen at all,
like every monitor we fed today
probably except for the exception of Elvis
actually ate the whole egg
and I only assumed its likely because
they're trying to get the most nutrition that they can.
You realize that if they were to crush the egg,
that likely is going to mean they lose a lot of it.
- Tiana is rebounding very nicely,
she's obviously kinda gotten away from
her protecting her nest
because we obviously cleaned her nest up
and she doesn't have that
egg thing going on in there anymore.
I actually reached out to my buddy Ty Park down in Florida,
he's got the largest iguana farm in the entire world.
As a matter of fact,
he's opening up a place called Iguana Land.
Gonna be ridiculous, I can't wait to go visit him
when this whole thing is over.
I think he said he's gonna open maybe in September,
gonna be crazy.
Regardless, he's actually looking for a male Lewisi hybrid,
maybe we can breed Tiana,
and instead of getting infertile eggs
maybe we can get some fertile babies,
that would be, yep, I think Tiana's saying yes too.
Yes, I think she says yes.
Yeah, yep, okay.
Sounds good, Tiana.
Perdida is obviously extremely well-behaved,
but I will say the only time I ever got bit by her
was once when she thought she mistook my hand for food.
So we wanna just be a little bit careful with her.
So ball training might not be a bad idea for her either.
There you go girl, there he is.
Beautiful.
She looks great, she just shed out.
She looks absolutely wonderful
so we figured we'd give her a little bit of a treat today.
We're not doing a big feeding today,
just a few animals but I figured, hey,
if I was gonna toss stuff out,
I'd hit Casper and I'd hit Perdida
because they both just shed out
and look absolutely amazing.
But I'm excited about this ball training with Night Fury,
I think it's gonna be really cool
and I can't wait to take you guys along on the journey,
and if it works, who knows,
maybe you guys can do that
for yourself too with your animals.
I mean, it's better than probably
putting them in a box to be honest with you,
because of the stress of moving
from a cage to a feeding box.
This is a great alternative, if it works,
it might be something that we could do with all our snakes.
(upbeat music)
Last clutch of the day is actually a blaze goini,
this is just a basically a blotch king
or Apalachicola county kingsnake
that just has super high red when they're babies,
I mean they are ridiculous as babies.
Super red, of course they fade out to this
but we're definitely gonna have to clean her cage up,
we'll get her some water, is always again,
I keep saying this,
we take the waters out
because snakes will
lay their eggs in the water if you don't.
You know, looks like a good clutch of eggs though,
pretty much, they're a little bit smaller
but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's like one egg may have broke off on the edge right here,
so we'll candle this just to make sure that it's good.
But it looks like we've got two, four, six, eight,
10, 12, 14, 15 eggs.
That's pretty amazing and you know,
I hope that you guys are enjoying
the kinda journey of collecting eggs
and seeing the different animals,
because again these are gonna be
hatching in another 60 days,
I don't want you guys to get bored with like,
"Oh, it's just another egg clutch."
Or something like that.
Because each snake is different, right.
And I'm trying to teach you guys
about those snakes as we go,
so let me know in the comments if you guys don't mind.
Over the next month and a half, two months,
you guys are probably gonna see a lot of egg collecting
and I don't want you guys to get bored.
(upbeat music)
Just one other clutch today,
it's actually a yellow belly
that's bred to a Mojave calico bee,
I'll show you that male in a second.
I'm gonna take a quick look and see what she's got.
Oh, she's got some good eggs
and she's got some bad eggs in here.
That's part of it.
Let's take a look at what male actually bred her.
This is actually a Mojave calico bumblebee,
so it has pastel, it has Mojave, it has calico,
it's got spider in it, so there's a lot of genes in there,
mixing the yellow belly should just brighten it up
and make it even more awesome.
Often times like calico and yellow belly
go together really well.
So with any luck, the few eggs that we have that are good
are gonna hatch out and produce some bangers.
Back to this female and let's see
what she actually has going on.
Like I said, I can see at least one slug, maybe two slugs.
Hard to say, maybe not that bad.
Let's see what we got going on.
Oh yeah, there's a few slugs in here.
Looks like about a 50% clutch which happens,
so we're just gonna take away the good eggs first,
these are really fresh.
Beautiful eggs by the way, too.
So mama, you still did good.
It's no big deal, and again,
the fact that there could be some infertiles
could be a number of things,
maybe the male just bred at the wrong time,
maybe the female laid on the heat
and fried some of the sperm, all that type of stuff.
So we've got three good eggs and we've got three slug eggs,
still not that bad to be totally honest with you.
Mom looks really good, we'll get her cleaned up
and she'll be good to go here pretty soon,
so hey, that's all for ball python eggs for the day.
I know how boring this quarantine can be,
so I've got an idea for you.
If you wanna really just waste a lot of time
right here is a playlist,
it's actually all of my 2019 vlogs.
You can also pay attention to the podcast right up here,
subscribe, it's called Checking In,
on this side you can subscribe to this channel
which I always do appreciate.
Have an absolutely wonderful day.
Remember to be kind to someone
and I promise I'll see you guys tomorrow.