- This is literally as rare as it gets.
Did you know, oh, took a little bite.
There is literally as little as 250 of these in the wild.
(upbeat music)
- Hey, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the vlog.
I really hope the start of your day is incredible.
I know mine is gonna be amazing here.
I get asked all the time, Brian,
what is your favorite animals?
And I always say I can't pick.
You know, I love all animals.
But I have just absolutely fallen in love with crocodilians.
You know my girl Salt here is a beautiful albino alligator.
But I'm just obsessed with all alligators, crocodiles,
caiman, all of the crocodilians.
I think they're truly amazing, and you may remember
that I mentioned when I was in Florida that I went to
a place called the Dragonwood Conservancy
that my buddy Forrest is the vice president of.
We're gonna head back up to Orlando.
Go visit Dragonwood Conservancy, a cool crocodile place,
to see some really rare crocodiles and alligators.
Well, I saved that footage for today's vlogs.
I hope that you guys are gonna enjoy, 'cause we definitely
saw some incredible crocodiles there,
some of the rarest crocodiles on the planet,
so I am gonna go ahead and just let you enjoy it.
And let me know what you guys think.
In the meantime I'm gonna go ahead
and spend some time with my girl Salt.
We're at Dragonwood Conservancy here, of course,
my buddy Forrest is involved with this,
so I am gonna put a link in the description
to all this stuff, please show them some love.
This is pretty absolutely ridiculous.
I'm not even gonna lie, there are
a lot of amazing crocodilians here.
I was just walked in a few seconds ago
and I'm already in love.
Look at these things.
Oh my gosh.
I've often said that Cuban crocodiles are really
my favorite crocodile, and I never thought that I was
gonna be somewhere where I would see a whole tub of 'em.
- Wait till we go to Cuba.
- When Savannah takes me to Cuba
there's gonna be a lot of Cuban crocodiles.
But, wow, look at how absolutely gorgeous they are!
And that's a lot of little babies.
Oh my god, that, I am pretty blown away,
I didn't expect to see this.
Oh my gosh.
Again, I'll be totally honest with you,
my good friend Forrest that you guys know well, obviously is
a big part of this, the vice president
of the Dragonwood Conservancy,
and there are so many amazing crocodiles.
These are just indoor, we're not gonna get a chance
to see outdoors 'cause it's one o'clock in the morning,
I'm not gonna lie to you, but, Forrest,
show me what you have going on here.
'Cause I'm a little overwhelmed, and I don't know
my crocodiles like you do, so I'm going to just
turn it over to you, go for it.
- Yeah, so you know how I'm dying for this,
I've been waiting for years to be able to finally
bring you here, this is a dream come true.
I'm so excited.
We got Savannah here, Brian.
- I'm blown away!
- So I get to show you guys something that's been
a project in my heart for over a decade.
And really how I came up in the game and what drove my love
into these rare and endangered species.
This is a nonprofit facility, it's not open to the public.
We exist for one reason, and that's preserving these
rare and endangered species in captivity.
So already now we're going on our fifth clutch
of Cuban crocodiles, three of 'em being unrelated.
We have the most diverse stock of Cuban crocodiles
in the United States, no hybrids, nothing like that, so.
Obviously with the Cuban crocodiles being some of
the most endangered crocodiles on earth we know
Savannah's working on that project really heavily as well.
That's been one of our main focuses.
So here you get to see a brand new clutch,
born in September, check these little guys out.
- Their curiosity, like the way they behave with each other,
the way they behave with fingers, I just love 'em so much.
- [Forrest] Look at these little guys.
How cute is that?
- [Brian] My favorite crocodile for sure.
Unbelievable, that is crazy.
Look at it!
- [Forrest] Just beautiful yellow, so intelligent.
- And not afraid, that's the thing about Cuban crocodiles.
Even when they're just little, like, they might be
afraid at first, but then when the biggest one
turns on you, they all turn on you.
'Cause they get done.
- Usually when you talk to croc keepers who have had
baby Cubans in the past that's what they talk about is
that it, just, keep your fingers out of there
'cause they will literally jump out of the tub and
nip your fingers, but the main keeper here, Brad,
he does all the hard work in here.
He's training these crocodiles day in and day out.
From the day they're born, he's working on behavioral
training to try to, used to, you know, human behavior
and what we're doing and our deliberate actions.
These guys learn, and they're intelligent, and they
know the difference between their keeper and their food
and where their food's coming from and so that's
a lot of what we do here, is observe their behavior,
learn everything we can about 'em, and try to
preserve these for generations to come.
- Certainly one of my favorite of all the caiman
are these guys here, broad snouted caiman.
They are absolutely incredible.
Look at the guys on these guys!
They kind of remind me of Cubans a little bit
with the kind of cool patterning on 'em.
But of course they are a caiman,
and I absolutely love these dudes.
- So look at this right here, we've got Cuban baby
from last September that hatched out,
so this from a different clutch.
You can see here, these guys are pretty docile.
We take these guys to educational programs.
Matt and Terry have both put in a ton of work
with these guys to where they're used to human interaction
and they can handle that stress
of being transported to educational programs.
We're able to go out there and spread the message of
conservation and what we're doing with these animals.
This right here is a Siamese crocodile.
And these guys are actually critically endangered.
CITES appendix I, extinct in most populations in the wild.
A great conservation story, though, they're doing great
in captivity, we have a pretty good genetic bank of 'em,
they're doing well in zoos and in facilities
like this, as well as in the skin trade.
There's a pretty big population of 'em there as well.
So although they were almost pretty much totally wiped out
in the wild, we were able to save them in captivity
and now we've done some reintroductions with them
and we're seeing that succeed in certain areas.
And we've also rediscovered some populations as well.
- [Savannah] Oh, really?
- It seems like every year they're finding, you know,
new populations in Cambodia and Thailand,
there's a few small areas that have popped up.
But the Siamese crocodile is just an incredible animal
and you can tell they put a lot of work into this one,
'cause usually these guys are pretty nippy and
you couldn't necessarily just handle 'em like this.
So, pretty cool.
- Of course, all the crocodilians that we're looking at were
indoors in a kind of baby raise out room, stuff like that.
And they actually have five acres of crocodiles outside.
But like I had mentioned in the vlog that I was
talking about getting there, it was like 1:30
in the morning, it was dark outside, no way you wanted
to go outside into five acres in the dark
with a bunch of really crazy crocodiles.
So I am excited.
We are gonna go back to the Dragonwood Conservancy at
some point to see all the adult outside crocodiles as well.
- So this, for me, is just mind blowing.
This is actually the first time
I've got to see this animal as well.
This is a Orinoco crocodile.
This is literally as rare as it gets.
Did you know, oh, took a little bite.
So, did you know that there is literally
as little as 250 of these in the wild?
So just stop and think about that for a second.
There's only a few clutches away from extinction.
This amazing crocodile from the Orinoco river
in the Llanos is almost gone.
Believe it or not there's just so many things
that makes this crocodile special.
It's one of the largest of the crocodilians.
It's believed to be at least the third largest.
So, you know, behind the salt water crocodile
and the Nile crocodile, these guys are recorded
at lengths of over 22 feet.
So the fact that we're able to work with something like that
where literally there's that few left in the wild,
this is extremely important that we get these guys
established in captivity and it's a real honor just to be
in the same room as an animal like this.
- Guys, this is unbelievable.
I have never been this close to one of these.
Forrest, I'm freaking out.
Tell me as much as you can.
- So this is the black or melanistic form of the
African slender snout crocodile, Mecistops cataphractus.
I've been waiting forever to show you guys,
I think this is the most amazing looking crocodile ever.
Every time I see it it just blows me away.
Less than 300 of these guys left in the wild.
We're doing everything we can to preserve
these guys in captivity so that these guys
can be around for generations to come.
- So here at Dragonwood you guys
are actually breeding these ones.
- We were the first to breed them.
We're raising up these animals right here,
the future breeders as well.
Our breeder male that produced these babies
is believed to be over 100 years old.
- [Savannah] What? - Is that not right, Brad?
Yes, 100 years old.
How amazing is that?
- I don't even know if you guys understand how
of a rare opportunity is to be this close to this animal.
This is literally one of the most incredible,
beautiful animals I've ever seen in my entire life.
And like I said, please, links in the description.
Show them some love, definitely, this is amazing.
And, listen, we're gonna be back, 'cause we wanna
see the outside at some point, and there's still
a few things we're gonna show you here, too, but, wow.
Incredible, absolutely incredible.
This is a really treat here, guys.
This is one of the most endangered crocodilians out there.
Of course, the Chinese alligator.
- We were one of the first people to go over to China
and kinda bridge that cultural gap and form
a relationship with them, and these guys are
pretty much at the point of extinction.
I mean, they're genetic bottle-necked, there's not enough
variability in the gene pool we think at this point
to save these guys, but, hey, we're certainly still
gonna try and, look how amazing that is.
I mean, that thing is unntaped, completely tame,
Yeah, this species is very close scorecard
and we are praying that we can get crossing those label
boundaries and work with some other facilities to get
a male for our females, because, yeah, that's what we need
to do is take advantage of every animal in captivity.
- Oh my gosh, this is a little Siamese crocodile.
Unbelievably cute.
Oh, I could play with these things all day.
I mean, it's coming up on two o'clock in the morning
and we have to get on a plane in just a handful of hours,
so we're gonna probably wrap up pretty soon.
But I'm so glad that we came by here.
This is absolutely incredible.
Whoa. (jaws snap)
Oh my gosh.
Did you guys hear that?
- That is some fire.
- And with that said, guys, I think that we are
getting out of here and ending this Florida adventure
tomorrow morning, actually, I should say in about two hours
we are boarding a plane and heading back to Michigan.
Back to the reptarium, back to BHB, and back to
some reality, but what an amazing adventure we had.
I hope that you guys enjoyed it, let me know
in the comments what was your favorite part.
You like me to do more stuff like this,
because it was an absolute blast for us.
I wish you guys have an absolutely amazing day
whenever you happen to be watching.
Do me a couple favors before we get out here.
Can you smash that like button, turn those
post notifications on so you know when I upload a video.
Maybe you'll make a comment, because I love
reading about your beautiful faces.
Kind to someone, and I promise I will see you tomorrow.
(chill music)