- Hey, good morning, everybody.
And welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start to your day is incredible.
My girl, Bella here.
Hey Belly, do you want a banana?
There you go girl, want a banana?
There you go. Silly monkey.
Been a while since I've just kind of went around
and showed you guys a bunch of animals.
I'm going to be honest with you.
It's been so busy with hatching and snake eggs
and all those other things and building things out
and everything like that,
that it's been a while since we just kind of hung out
with the animals and kind of seen stuff. Right?
I can't remember the last time
I fed Bella a banana on the vlog.
And she's obviously doing super well.
She is such a beautiful animal. That's for sure.
Bella, what's the matter, girl?
She doesn't like when banana gets on her face.
She's such a dainty girl, I know baby girl.
You want another piece? That's okay, baby.
I love you so much.
And you could see she's still my absolute baby.
So I think we're to go around
and just see what's going on here with some of my animals.
And, you know, Bella was kind of that first animal
that really opened my eyes to relationships with reptiles.
Right? When I got Bella and actually started
to form the bond that we have together,
it really changed my perception.
And she was the one that kind of pushed me in the direction
that I'm going now.
So she is a pretty special animal for me, for sure.
And one that I just wanted to start this vlog out with,
because again, in a way,
she kind of started this whole adventure
that I'm on right now.
It's been a minute since we saw Toothless here
and we'll show you what we've got going on with him.
He's definitely starting to target on the ball really well.
Come on, bud.
And so what we're going to do
is get him out of the cage first.
Come on, come on Toothless, come on, let's go.
And then the idea is that we're taking the laser
and we're guiding him to the next food.
Come on bud.
There you go.
There it is.
It's just a little bit of a process.
Again, we're getting them out with the ball,
then we're lasering them around, getting them to food.
And it's pretty awesome
to see he's really coming a long way.
It's just crazy to think that you can literally
laser train a lizard. How cool is that again?
Again, sometimes it's just nice to walk around
and see the animals that we admire every day.
But oftentimes our working with them,
whether it's a training thing or behavior thing
or cleaning their cages.
And certainly there is no more iconic animal
at the Reptarium than Fernita.
I mean, she is the animal that people freak out about.
I love her to death.
There is no doubt she's amazing.
And once again, this last weekend we saw it happen
where there were people that were afraid to hold snakes
and then they get to Fernita
and they're like, you know what?
I'm going to hold this little monkey right here.
So she is literally, I say 95% of people's first snake
that they hold at the Repatarium is my girl Fernita
and I can see why, because she's not only beautiful,
but she's also one of the most placid snakes
you'll ever see.
I see what Elvis is up to.
As soon as he sees the blue ball,
he's going to come running.
Come on Elvis, come on, bud.
Come on out, come on out.
Come on, Elvis. This way.
There you go bud.
There you go, buddy.
There you go.
Good job, buddy.
This isn't easy to do with one hand in a camera.
Typically I have two hands.
It'll all work out.
Then the last piece on his own, which is completely fine.
I just wanted to bring Elvis out
because obviously he's doing amazing.
He's an amazing animal.
I love this guy and you guys know that we let him
run around for probably hour or two hours every day.
He knows every inch of the Reptarium.
So we'll just let him have some fun,
but there is no doubt that Elvis here, my buddy, again,
once that blue ball is gone, he knows there's no more food.
He is life changing for sure,
because he's really the first lizard we've trained,
not only with the ball,
but also a lot of other things
that we've worked on him with, and he's just,
he's just really, truly an incredible animal
and an incredible animal ambassador.
When people come to the Reptarium, you can see,
he's just like, there's gotta be more chicken in there.
When people come to the Reptarium
and actually get an opportunity to feed Elvis,
they freak out because again, he's so trained.
Not only to go after that blue ball,
I can get him to climb up my leg.
I can get them to do anything I want him to do.
But as soon as that blue ball is gone,
he knows there's no more food and he's happy as can be.
He's such a wonderful animal.
(upbeat music)
Of course, my girl Ivy is just sitting up here.
So absolutely beautiful.
I love the fact that I knew when I crawled in here,
he was going to crawl right up to me
and kind of investigate me and sure enough,
that's what she's doing.
It's just like, Dad, what are you doing in here?
You know, I love this girl so much.
And again, it's unusual for her to be kind of perched
where she is right now.
So as soon as I said that, I'm like,
I've got to jump in this enclosure and just spend some time.
I'll probably spend the next half hour or so in here.
Just let her crawl around again. You'll see.
She's just kind of curious, like, Dad, what are you doing?
And the thing I love about her so much in her curiosity
and Aries is the same way
is the fact that it's almost cooler to not touch them,
right, to just sit kind of quietly
and let them decide what they want to do.
Because of their curiosity,
they always seem to come and investigate.
And oftentimes when it gets to it,
there's just going to be all over me
on my lap and everything
without me actually forcefully making her come onto my lap.
I think it's actually amazing.
So anacondas have changed my life
when it comes to kind of the perceptions of snakes
and just the relationship with it.
And a Ivy is amazing.
So of course, you know I'm going to update you
on my girl, Ivy.
And of course, my guy Aries in the water over there.
He's doing amazing too.
So this enclosure is definitely one of my favorite things
I've ever done in my entire life with animals.
(suspenseful music)
That's Aries being cheeky right now, oh my gosh.
I gotta be careful, he's coming.
He's just really going nuts here.
I don't know what his deal is.
Aries, stay back.
Aries.
Stop it.
Okay, okay.
Aries, knock it off.
Oh my goodness gracious.
He's turned into a monster.
Oh my goodness.
What is up with you, Aries?
Tell you what, I wasn't expecting Aries to be like this.
He is definitely got a little bit feisty right now.
Come on guys.
Okay.
Okay, monkey.
You're all right, you're okay.
We're friends.
Are we okay?
I'll be honest with you.
I think he was just in food mode.
Now I think he's kind of broke the food mode thing,
but I don't know.
I think if I got too close to him,
I think he might bite you right now to be honest with you.
Oh yeah. Look at him.
He's coming back around.
This isn't a good sign.
He's definitely got a lot different attitude
since he's been in the water here with Ivy.
I tell you what, you're gonna have to be careful with him
in the future, that's for sure.
Ivy, never concerned.
Aries, he's probably not going to be coming out,
hanging out with people anytime soon.
It's like I said,
sometimes animals change their behavior
when they get into new environments.
Obviously Aries has just turned into food mode right now.
I'm sure he's still great,
when I take him out, he's going to be amazing,
but definitely have to keep a close eye on him
because there is no doubt that if I would've got close,
he was coming at me.
I mean, that was crazy.
I've been attacked by anacondas before, just like that.
So I know that their actions, Aries was on fire.
But in the meantime, Ivy's just sitting back thinking,
what are you doing you little monkey?
So nevertheless, that was still pretty fun.
And in the end I didn't lose any blood.
I think someone might be interested in some roaches.
What do you guys think?
There's another one.
Oh, he's hungry now.
Nova's great.
Here you go bud.
Go get it, go get it, go get it.
There you go, Buddy.
Of course here comes Lilith.
I knew she'd come like, oh,
got a little fight going on here.
Hey, you guys stop it.
Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
You guys can both get food, both get food.
Wow. These guys are crazy.
Well, that was certainly an adventure.
Those guys were hungry today and I was a little worried.
They were definitely going at it, fighting each other.
They are absolutely cute.
And now they both have full bellies.
Of course, checking in with my guy karma here
that I'm sure is going to be happy to eat.
You miss all the time, bud.
What are you doing?
Oh my gosh. This thing is so crazy.
I've never seen a chameleon so hard to eat.
I mean, this thing you misses all the time.
You have to literally put the roach in its mouth.
We'll eat like five or six roaches almost every day.
So it's definitely crazy, but Karma is amazing.
And of course we got his little girl, Destiny.
that's pretty awesome too.
(upbeat music)
Certainly one of the most popular animals at the Reptarium
is Ben and Jerry, I mean, look at these guys.
They're so absolutely amazing.
Again, having two headed animals at the Reptarium
is a big thing.
We're going to be bringing over, of course, Chopsticks,
the two headed rendered slider anytime.
And they're going to be absolutely amazing.
We typically bring them over just to show kids
and stuff like that, but we keep them at the atrium,
but we have the new exhibit being made.
So that'll be really exciting.
But Ben and Jerry are doing absolutely amazing.
And when they shed,
they'll actually sometimes split that scab,
that little area where they got injured several months ago,
so we use some silver self idizing
that is actually like a medication for them
just to heal up a little bit.
So they're doing very well.
Absolutely amazing.
Two headed snakes are cool.
You guys know how much I love him.
And Ben and Jerry are certainly spectacular.
Take a look at baby Kush.
As soon as I opened up the enclosure,
completely just kind of like eyes get dilated.
What are you going to do?
It's completely wondering what's going on.
And it is a little bit of a dilemma.
I'm not going to kid you because you could see,
he's kind of like ripping up all the plants
and stuff like that.
And it's a little hard to get in here
and really do a thorough cleaning all around.
'Cause we don't want to stress out baby Kush
by like grabbing it and pulling it out of the cage.
But by going in, we have to be careful.
So what we're going to have to do is always have like Bruce
inside cleaning and doing maintenance
and I'm kind of protecting him with baby Kush, you know,
just to make sure he doesn't do anything like attack
or anything like that.
Slowly, getting it together again,
very competent animal, eating, target training super well.
Now it's just a matter of a gaining enough trust
for us that we could actually interact with it,
take it out and actually have a relationship with it.
Right now, we're not there.
I'm going to be honest with you.
As you get closer, as you can see,
it just gets a little bit more freaky.
It'll kind of puff up and go like, okay,
what are you thinking about? See?
It's just immediately like, uh oh.
I don't want to get too much closer to that.
I don't want to stress it out
and I don't want to break that trust. Right?
But definitely an interesting animal,
but definitely one that has some challenges.
The first ever leachie gecko that I ever got,
of course the giant New Caledonian geckos
was this girl here, Big Bertha.
And she's still here at the Reptarium.
She's in with the male, we're hoping we'll breed this fall
and get some eggs from her next year
and maybe get some first babies here.
Of course we're continuing to grow our group.
We just got 2.4, two males and four females
just here a couple of weeks ago that were babies.
And we have a handful of other adult leachies as well,
including one of the popular ones here
that's called Reptar,
but Big Bertha still is so special to me
because she's our first leachie
and she certainly has gotten big
and I cannot wait until she hopefully has some eggs
here next year.
File to the 41 year old snapping turtle,
alligator snapping turtle.
When you walk in, this is the first display that you see.
So it's always pulling.
People are always like, is he really alive?
Is he a statue?
Cause he stays kind of solid.
One of the things we feed them is crocodile trout,
which the Missouri manufactured food for crocodilians.
That's just one of the things, we also feed him chicken,
we feed them fish, we feed him all kinds of stuff.
Let's go ahead and give them a couple of little biscuits
and see, I love feeding this guy.
It's always interesting.
He's typically not as enthusiastic as people usually think
when they think of snapping turtles,
he's kind of lazy about it,
but that's just because he's so spoiled here.
(upbeat music)
See what my guys Diddy and Dixie are doing today.
Come on out Diddy, come on, let's go.
Come on Dixie. Come on down.
Hi girl. Hi, bud.
Come on, there they come.
Go on girl. Come on.
Let's go.
There you go, baby. There you go.
They're so gentle.
Of course these guys are absolutely amazing.
Come on Diddy.
Come on, all the way up. Come on, come on, come on.
Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up that's my boy.
Dixie, come here.
There you go, sweetheart.
I mean what a crazy thing, right?
To just have lizards that are like,
these things are more like puppy dogs
than they are anything.
Come on Dixie, come on over here.
Come on, silly.
Wanna climb on farther?
Come on all the way up.
Can you come up here?
Come on, all the way.
That's my boy. That's my boy.
So Diddy is definitely the more trusting one.
Come here girl, come on, all the way up.
There you go, sweetheart.
Want another one?
Come here.
Okay guys, you guys are funny.
You guys got to go back home now, right?
All right. So let's do the clicker.
Get them back home.
Okay guys, let's go back.
Come on, let's go back, come on, back home, back home.
Back home, back home, back home.
And that's where it's like to have a couple
of little pet dinosaurs.
So it's just kind of cool sometimes to walk around
and figure out what the heck these animals are doing.
And today was interesting.
A lot of weird kind of action going on,
I mean definitely this guy here, Aries.
He was a trip. Had a good time.
I hope that you guys enjoyed the little update,
the kind of little tour of the zoo
and kind of revisiting some of the animals
that you haven't seen maybe as often with Bella
and some of the other animals, regardless,
I hope that you enjoyed the video.
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Have an absolutely wonderful day.
Remember be kind of to someone,
and I promise I'll see you tomorrow.