- Hey good morning everybody and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is amazing.
I truly hope it is.
I'm obsessed, I am obsessed with my green anaconda Ivy.
Her behavior, the way everything...
Like I mentioned, we're gonna actually be
feeding her in a day or so, but she is just cruising.
I mean she's looking for food, it's amazing.
But today I'm not gonna feed a giant anaconda,
I'm gonna feed my other anaconda.
My little tiny anaconda named Verde.
Here's my girl Verde, I tell ya,
anacondas are such an unusual animal.
Like nothing I've ever done before,
so I'm just gonna go ahead, give her a little shot,
see if she's interested in eating,
she sure looks like she's interested.
Come on girl.
There she is!
She took that right away.
Look at that.
It's so incredible,
and like I mentioned I've been working with snakes
since I was a kid
and after working with Ivy
and of course Verde my little anaconda here,
it is really truly amazing.
They are different than any other snakes.
I mean we say that like retics are a little bit different,
every snake is a little bit different,
there's no doubt about it
but there is something wild about anacondas.
The actions, the way they think,
Ivy is blowing me away.
Like I mentioned, I'm obsessed with
her actions and her behavior,
it's like nothing I've ever seen.
The curiosity she has, just shows a level of intelligence.
And of course Verde is doing well.
Anyone that remembers Verde remembers that
when she was a baby she wouldn't eat at all,
then she'd only eat live chicks for a long time.
Then ultimately she started eating rats,
now of course she is pounding food like this
and of course we can't wait till she gets as big as Ivy.
And maybe they can cohabitate that
or maybe we'll do another one.
And I have been thinking about maybe picking up a male
and giving a go at breeding green anacondas as well,
'cause I think it would be really cool
and that enclosure, having a male and a female like Ivy
and see if they would breed
and I would just imagine that naturalistic enclosure,
they have all those options
that breeding would be pretty successful.
Regardless, I'm gonna let Verde eat here
and I tell you what, anacondas, they're the pinnacle.
I mean they're such an amazing snake!
(upbeat music)
And Verde is all finished up,
she looks so absolutely incredible.
And the thing is anacondas when they're small
do typically grow pretty slow,
once they hit about five, six foot
that's when they start to really explode.
We've seen it with Ivy,
she went from literally 40 pounds to 75 pounds
in just a matter of like four or five months,
so Verde is still a little girl
even though she's about a year and a half old.
Eventually here in the next year or so,
you're gonna start to see her explode.
Then she'll obviously get larger habitats,
more water features because that's one thing.
Seeing how Ivy has acted with this water feature,
definitely cannot wait to get Verde into an enclosure
that we can have a big water feature
for her to cruise around in too, so,
but she's doing amazing.
Again like I had mentioned before that
we were really kinda wrapping up the breeding season,
you can see this is a banana extreme gene, het ghost
that's bred to just a big het ghost female right here.
We actually put 35 males in yesterday,
that's the last of the breeding.
And now the 35 males if I had a hookup
I would say probably about 15 of those
would be done for the year,
so looks like what we were breeding
20 to 25 animals after today,
but out of the 35 males, just like this guy right here,
31 of them were breeding today so, that's pretty cool, so.
We're definitely wrapping up the breeding season,
it's super.
I'm gonna go ahead and shut these guys,
let them be for the day,
let them do their business, you know what I mean.
But it's pretty exciting to get to that point.
Like I said, 10 or 15 of these females are done
now that they've been bred
and then we just have, you know,
that last 20, 25 females that might be breeding
for the next two to three weeks
and then they're gonna be shelved.
But again, we've been getting some clutches of ball pythons.
But the fact is that we'll be getting
a ton of clutches in about three weeks.
(upbeat music)
And obviously another big snake like an anaconda
but of course a reticulated python is my girl Lucy,
I knew she was gonna shed out,
again just like Ivy shed the other day
but Lucy is definitely not as tiny when it comes to sheds.
Although honestly, her cage looks pretty good.
Normally she just blows it up like crazy,
she shed most of it right in here,
right in the water dish right here, so all I have to do is,
she's got a little bit of shed on her like as always
so I'll pull her out, interact with her a little bit,
hopefully she's in a good mood,
get her in some salt, clean this entire cage up
and then get her back in the enclosure,
but she's always an amazing animal.
Let's see what kind of a mood she's in today.
So far she's acting like she's pretty good.
Good girl.
Oh yeah, she seems like she's in a pretty good mood
and you can almost tell as soon as you touch her
what kind of a mood she's in.
Because she'll like kinda spike up if she is in a bad mood
and she'll like act up
and she'll be like, "Leave me alone, dad!"
So she's pretty good right now.
Again I'm always gonna be careful
because you never know what's gonna happen,
like right now for instance.
Okay, good.
Phew, just for that one second
she started to look like, "Uh oh!"
But like I said, she's got 90% of her shed off now.
She's a big snake.
(grunts)
There you go baby, there you go.
Hard to explain just the power that a snake like this has.
I mean she is a big snake and she's just all muscle.
There you go baby!
Come on, come on!
And you can see she just has that
little bit of stuck shed on her,
nothing major at all
but she loves to soak anyways so we'll go ahead,
give her a nice soak.
Trying to work with this girl is not easy.
Again, it's a 20 foot, two inch piece of muscle.
Okay.
There you go, baby.
Like I said, she loves water.
So I'd be pretty surprised
if she gave me a hard time getting into the water.
Here you go baby, let's go.
Come on.
Come on!
I know you like the water.
And there she goes...
Oh, maybe not!
(laughs)
I love this snake so much.
Though people ask me all the time what my favorite snake is
and I can never really answer it 100%,
but there's no doubt that Lucy is right up there.
'Cause she's so fun, right,
you never know what you're gonna get.
She's spicy, right, like one day she's your friend,
one day she wants to try to bite you.
Just never know but she is a fun snake.
And I love her to death.
So I'm gonna go ahead and just get her in here,
then we'll clean her cage up.
She'll love that little salt.
And then we'll get her back in.
Gotta catch my breath.
(upbeat music)
And although it's a lot of work you know
keeping not only Lucy but all these animals clean,
the truth is is that I do count my blessings every day.
I'd rather be doing this
than anything else in the entire world,
not to mention it keeps my mind going.
We're pretty busy, weirdly enough
between cleaning and feeding
and doing all the maintenance and virtual tours
and all the other stuff, so.
And a lot of that is because of you guys keeping us busy
so we do appreciate it,
so you may think like, "Wow, that's a lot of work!"
But the truth is, this is what I would do
if it was my hobby.
This is what I want to do on my days off,
so I love this stuff.
- Okay so we have a squirrel
infestation problem in our dumpster, okay,
and it's not even our fault.
It's our stupid neighbor's fault
'cause they won't empty the trash back there.
So I already know this, Beth's been attacked
about two or three times.
It's true?
- That's totally true.
- And when I see it attack, I literally mean it was on her.
And like, "Ah!"
Okay?
That was a squirrel.
- [Cameraman] Wait, onto Beth?
- Yeah, it's been like...
- [Cameraman] It went on you?
- A chipmunk jumped on me and tried to get in my Coke
and there's the big fat gray squirrel
that when I went to take trash out
I opened up the dumpster and it literally flew out.
- So there's a side door on the dumpster
and it just so happened to be open.
I'm walking, had my stuff, okay I'm walking,
just thinking about life, how beautiful it is outside right,
I hear a little rumbling and my first instinct was,
"Squirrel!"
So I start running, right, I'm running.
I'm running as fast as I can,
I'm looking behind my shoulder
'cause I suspect to see something
and right out the corner of my eye,
I see a squirrel jump out of the dumpster.
"Wah!"
And it just lands and it runs away,
but if I would have been like, "Oh what's the rumbling?"
It would have jumped out on me!
- [Cameraman] Dude no way,
well I'm glad you're here man, glad you're alive.
- I know.
It was scary.
- [Cameraman] Hard in them streets, huh?
- It's hard.
You guys know that we're deep in the breeding season
when it comes to colubrids, of course
this is just a hypo motley corn snake,
come on little buddy, you stay inside right there.
And of course that means that
we have to feed pretty heavily.
This is a black corn snake or an anerythristic corn snake.
And basically what that means is that
we increase the food amount
to the females as much as possible
because they need a lot of calories.
I've said this before when you're breeding snakes,
calories in, production out, right.
This is just a beautiful...
Oh man, that's really beautiful.
This is actually just a hypo corn snake
but they have some really interesting colors,
so Lori is feeding the heck out of stuff
just trying to make sure that everything is in good shape.
And that's kinda what this time of year is.
Again, just a okeetee corn,
so these girls look nice and plump
but we have to keep putting food to them,
so we'll literally feed like an adult corn
or an adult Cal king typically two mice, twice a week.
So they're getting like four mice a week,
where in the off season they might get two mice,
sometimes even one mouse so,
we're increasing the food at least 200%
sometimes as much as 400%.
That gets them fat, that gets them to produce follicles
and ultimately produce eggs,
so Lori has to feed a lot of snakes today.
(upbeat music)
Been a while since I've actually updated you guys
on our blue-tongued skinks down here,
of course the breeding season was over,
we got some gravid females,
now typically we have babies like the middle to end of May,
so maybe a month, month and a half,
girls like this are starting to swell up pretty good
and hopefully we'll get some really beautiful babies.
This is actually a blaze animal,
it's a little faded right now
but when it was a baby it was unbelievable,
and we hung onto a few really special animals from last year
I can't wait to show you guys.
Just take a look at this one right here,
this is actually a coffee animal which is a polygenic animal
that is just, ooh, I tell you what,
that thing is ridiculous.
And then this one is actually
a coffee female bred to a red male,
and I'll tell you what, the color on that thing
and the sides is ridiculous.
I love these animals, and that's the thing
that's nice about blue-tongued skinks
is as they get older, they just get better and better.
This as a baby was really cool
but now as a yearling it's ridiculous.
And this honestly is just
a nice little orange baby that we have.
We have an orange line that we've been working on,
it's not like fluorescent or anything like that
but it definitely is nice,
I mean I love the flaming on the sides and stuff like that
and blue-tongued skinks are just such beautiful animals,
I can't wait till we have babies
and like I said, hopefully just about
four to six weeks away.
Just finishing up feeding?
- No.
- [Brian] No?
(laughs)
Did they go okay?
- Oh yeah.
- [Brian] Stuff's feeding real well and stuff like that?
- Oh yeah.
- [Brian] Is anything go off of food yet for gravid or no?
- Not yet.
- [Brian] Okay, good.
So basically what'll happen is that
when females get to a certain size of like,
full of eggs they just stop eating,
so thankfully everything is still eating
which is a good sign.
- Exactly, just kinda feeding them up.
So they've got all that body fat to produce eggs.
- [Brian] Now I'm excited, I'm excited
that you're taking over this
and Lori's been working her butt off,
I'm not gonna lie to you, so I would,
I would take her out to dinner but I can't!
We're not allowed to, so.
I'm just telling you that.
- You can make dinner.
- [Brian] It's the thought that counts.
- Yeah.
- [Brian] I make dinner every night!
- I'll think about what I want you to make.
- [Brian] I make dinner every night, right?
- Uh, not every night.
Some nights.
- [Brian] Okay, three out of the last four nights.
- Some nights.
- [Brian] Three out of the last four. Give me credit.
- Picking up carryout doesn't really count as making dinner.
- [Brian] Oh yeah, that's right.
That was the one out of the three! (laughs)
The other three I cooked!
- Whatever.
- [Brian] Okay, I'll cook tonight.
All right, time for Lucy to go back again.
She got all of the shed off now
so she looks absolutely amazing.
You did good girl.
There you go sweetie, whoa!
Don't buck me little girl.
(grunts)
She's always, whoa!
That was a little bit weird.
Didn't expect that one.
Thankfully her mouth was not open,
because she shot up and hit me pretty hard right there, so.
She's gotten into a little bit of a weird mood, that's okay.
She's all right now,
so I'll just let her kinda crawl around for a second,
dry her off a little bit and get her back in the cage.
You're okay sweetheart.
Now I bet you dollars to donuts
that she's gonna go up in the tree
as soon as I get her back in her cage.
Come on sweetheart.
This is a big snake.
There you go.
You see, she's like, "My cage!"
Here you go baby.
Right in there, there you go sweetheart.
Again, we'll see what happens
but she's a pretty predictable girl,
normally she'll go right up into her tree
and hang out there for half the day.
There you go sweetheart.
And there she goes.
That's definitely retic OCD right there.
In these times of social distancing, who needs a gym?
Just get yourself a 20 foot snake and you're all set.
There it is guys, I'll see you tomorrow
and if you haven't got enough of me
you can actually roll through
a playlist of stuff right here,
or you can actually subscribe
to my podcast channel Checking In right up here,
you guys will have tons of content,
you'll probably get sick of me pretty soon,
but hopefully you'll enjoy it.
You can also subscribe to this vlog channel right there
if you don't mind, I really do appreciate it.
Have an absolutely wonderful day,
remember we're gonna get through that,
and especially be kind to people right now.
I promise I will see you tomorrow.