Thursday, June 30, 2011

"Perdi" Frustrating!

Perdi is officially driving me nuts. Seriously. I know she's a total newbie to all of this egg business since she's never laid, but COME ON! Animals lay/give birth to their first offspring every day! In fact, I was just with a close friend when had her first baby - she'd never had one before, never seen one born, but she knew what to do! Sheesh.

For the past 3 or 4 days (I've lost track) Perdi has not left the nest box area. She's either in it or on it. When this first began a few nights ago, when I was misting I saw her with just her back feet and tail sticking out of the box, and the next day she was laying on the top of the box. I thought maybe she was guarding her newly-laid eggs. Not to be! She was back in the box later that night. Tonight she's completely buried except for just her head (which is still in the box, just not under any moss). I'm really hoping she's laying as we speak. She hasn't touched her food the last two feedings which is definitely unusual for her.

Because she's taking so long, I worry a bit about egg-binding or her having trouble laying for some other reason, I'll see how things look tomorrow. Pray for two beautiful eggs and this will all seem to have been a very frustrating dream! :) I don't want to have to find a reptile vet who can actually help me out around here. My area, despite being the largest city in Kansas, is severely lacking in herp vets who are even remotely worth their salt. I've been to two, and one of them had never even seen a crested gecko! Um HELLO this is probably THE most popular lizard in the hobby, only perhaps a close second to the leopard gecko. Sheesh.

Pray, cross your fingers, send positive thoughts, do what you do for Perdi please! I'm getting concerned, and beyond impatient. But at this point her health is what's most important to me and I just want her to get those eggs out, even if they're ugly slugs.

You can do it Perdi! Just PUSH! (Hehe... I was saying to my friend just recently!) Maybe Perdi needs an epidural too... ;)

Monday, June 27, 2011

Girl Interrupted, Part II

Let me just start by saying YAY! :) Liebchen ended up laying me a lovely set of eggs, both looking beautifully calcified and definitely fertile. I am glad I did not upset her enough to cause any problems last night.

Perdi was digging in her laybox tonight when I was misting... fingers crossed STILL! All I could see was her back legs and tail, the rest of her was buried. :)

And Pâté should be laying here in the next week or two, I realized. She last laid on the 29th of May and then was with Frank on the 3rd. Going by others' experiences and mine with Sausage (the gargoyle female who I bred last year) I don't expect eggs to be laid as soon or often as the cresteds (so we're probably looking more at the 2 week range). Last year I kept track of the number of days between clutches for all my laying females, and found that generally my crestie girls had somewhere in the 30's (days) between clutches, whereas my gargoyle laid clutches with the time between being in the mid to late 40's. I can't wait for gargoyle eggs! They are so much fun to hatch out - the babies are always little fatties (and sometimes extremely sassy, I'll have to explain Weenie's name sometime as an example) - they make the crestie babies look incredibly fragile and delicate.

I just can't wait for babies in general this year! All new pairings and geckos who haven't produced offspring yet, so it's always a fun roll of the dice. However, I've learned to have patience. I put the incubators where I don't see them often until I'm expected hatching to occur. Otherwise it's just too easy to check check check, when really it's best to leave your eggs alone! :)

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Lesson Learned: Take Inventory.

Tonight I was doing the rounds misting everyone and checking layboxes, etc... pulled out the one in Liebchen's cage and saw the end of a beauty (eggs feel almost like pearls or something to me when I find them)! Got so excited, set the laybox aside to do when I was done, and finished misting. Then I got everything set up to candle and mark the eggs, and brought the laybox and incubator into the bathroom to do so. Peeked at the bottom of the box (it's clear) to see where I'd seen the egg was, and started carefully digging into the moss (I use long-stranded sphagnum).

Uhh...... saw egg.... saw leg of moving gecko. CRAP. Liebchen was still in there and not finished. :( I felt horrible. I didn't see another egg (though I wasn't looking I was too busy trying to get her covered back where she was)... so she may have still been in the process of laying. That or she was just resting a bit before burying them. That really should have been my first hint - cresties bury the eggs very well and the fact that I was not seeing two eggs side by side clearly in the bottom of the laybox should have tipped me off. But I let my excitement get ahold of me.

So lesson learned? Always inventory your girls before going in for eggs! There are a ton of hiding spots in Liebchen's tub and I don't always see her, so I just thought it nothing out of the norm. But once I saw that egg I should have popped open hiding places to make sure she was out of the box.

Now we wait, and cross our fingers AND toes for two eggs. I will be horrified if I disturbed her so badly that she holds onto the other egg and binds up or something. But really I just uncovered her butt (frogbutt) and a foot, so hopefully she didn't think too much of it. She didn't come out of the box at least, and I didn't hear or feel her moving when I was taking the laybox back to her tub.

Will update tomorrow when she's out of there! Lesson learned, sorry Liebchen.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Absolutely Adorable.

I think all baby animals are adorable (maybe some more than others... pelican chicks are not exactly attractive), but little tortoises sleeping are near the top of my list. I completely admit my bias, since it was my own little tort (Artemis - an Ibera Greek) in this case, but I love seeing pics of other folks' torties sleeping too! But seriously, look at this, try to tell me it's not absolutely adorable:



He was not exactly thrilled with my flash in his face, but he only woke up a little to try glare at me. He was fairly unsucessful in my opinion, he's still unbearably cute. :-P



Yes, I know... now you're wondering what the heck his "double shell" of silver is. It's easiest to answer with a photo:



Yeaaaaaah, that's one of his hides. On nights that he doesn't feel like burrowing, he often does this. As for why he sticks his head out, beats me!! Though I feel I should mention that after I disturbed him SO much (sense the sarcasm? 3 pictures, please) he did burrow into his aspen and cannot be seen anymore. Apparently he should have a "NO paparazzi!!" sign on his shell!

Artemis is going to have his first birthday a week after mine, on the 26th! <3 He has grown so much. I wish I'd taken regular shots of him next to something like a quarter to show his growth, but I fail in that department. I'll poke through the pics of when I got him sometime soon and see if there is anything that gives some scale. I've really loved having him, he's just hilarious. He has a very distinct personality and believe you me, he let's me have it when I am late with his lunch!!


In other news, Perdi still hasn't laid, the little punk. Maybe she's holding out for Father's Day/my birthday (Sunday, the 19th). That would be fine, but so would sooner! I also candled the eggs again tonight - I was right about the iffy egg of Panic's, it was indeed infertile and went moldy. The other egg looks absolutely perfect though and has a beautiful cheerio! I candled Liebchen's set again just out of curiosity (I don't usually handle my eggs this much but this is already a weird year and I'm carefully keeping an eye on things), and one is coming along nicely, though the other looks to be developing incorrectly. So I'm gonna guess only one of those ends up hatching. Who knows! With virgin females, it's always a roll of the dice. But there are still many months left in the breeding season and I'm not concerned. :)

Friday, June 10, 2011

Panic! EGG!

No don't panic, the eggs are ok! BUT, Panic the gecko DID finally lay a set of eggs. :D It seems like I've been waiting forever for her to drop them, though really it's only been slightly over two weeks since she was with Inigo. So I was not surprised to find that one looks to be a dud. Or should I say feels - as soon as I touched it I was pretty sure it was infertile. Infertile eggs are not very solid, they're often dented, and sometimes strangely calcified. This one was very "squishy" (as in not holding it's "egg shape"), and it was somewhat difficult to clean off, even though all I use is long stranded sphagnum moss in my lay boxes. I also candled it and only saw yellow (no cheerio) - I've put it in the "weird egg" incubator just in case but I highly doubt it will do anything but mold over soon.

HOWEVER, the other egg had a definite cheerio, is nicely calcified, and I have high hopes for it. :) It looks to be a fertile myrtle, and I would imagine her eggs from now on will be. I'm just super excited to have an egg from this pair, even if it is the only one I get!

Perdi should lay any day now... she is digging in her box every night and she's not eating (which is often the case with gravid females about to lay). I wish she'd just get it over with, I *really* want to have some dalmation babies this year. It's been almost a month since she was with Pongo so I'm expecting them any day. Then again, she's never laid before so she may hold out on me yet. I feel she'd do it just to spite me - she has that kind of personality. :-P

The other eggs from Liebchen are developing nicely! I've been a bit worried about them because the temperatures here are record-breaking hot, and my gecko room gets all southern exposure. It can get very hot, but I am certainly doing all I can to prevent that including cold wet towels over fans, etc. When I try to look at it objectively I realize that several degrees in temperature shouldn't affect them too much - I figure they go through similar changes in the wild. Fingers crossed in any case, I'm slightly paranoid - especially since some of these babies are already spoken for!

Friday, June 3, 2011

Love Hurts.

My gecko Wesley and I (he is the gecko featured in the header of all the pages of my site, Familiar Exotics) have a unique relationship. I realize that he is a strange, somewhat confused and very entertaining GECKO. However, he thinks that my HANDS are wonderful, beautiful, most amazingly smelling female geckos. They are not. They are human hands. However, I do not think Wesley will ever realize his unfortunate mix-up.

Whenever I'm in his cage, whether to clean, mist, or feed, he tries to get to my hands so that he can subdue them with bites and chirp chirp chirp to his heart's content. Usually it's not much of a bother because crestie bites don't really hurt - they have such small teeth that I'd never had a painful bite (gargoyles are a different story).

Tonight... was different.

"Dum de dum, I'm not doing anything. I'm just sitting here lookin' cute!"


"What?! I'm completely innocent! Look at this face! See, I'm even smiling!"


Let me just respond to that with a "yeah right!" Retard. Check this out:



Yeah, believe it or not, that's a crested gecko bite. Little punk. He grabbed me like usual, but I wasn't expecting it and he got the entire end of my pinky in his mouth, up to right below the nail. And this bite HURT! I had to distract him with the other hand to finally get him off, and then he climbed up to the top of his cage to follow me for the pictures you see of him above.

So yeah, it bled quite a bit! I was surprised, the actual bite isn't very big (this is after I washed it out):


But it still hurts, dang it. Just a bad place for a bite. It's all puffy and you can even see a line on my nail where the some more of his teeth were.



So in any case, watch out for those crestie bites! Haha, just kidding. This was just one of those random freak events. I have been bit worse by one of my gargs - cresties are at the bottom of the totem pole as far as bite pain/damage goes.

Cresties < Gargoyles < Tokays (And this is why I do not have a Tokay!)



Edited to add: I just witnessed the necessary activity for Frank x Pâté babies! So super excited. Frank's never worked so fast in his life (was like 5-10 minutes) - guess since she wasn't squawking at him he decided to take his chance!