Drama Drama Drama

Guilty as charged your honour.  Before you stands the accused who wilfully attacked her denmate leaving him battered and bruised.

That's right....unfortunately Lolly attacked Booster the other day.  She has given him a nasty bite or two on his tail.  He's also limping around on his right fore limb.

He looks like he might lose the end of his tail.  This is more an aesthetic thing, but it does look a little nasty at the moment.  I am mostly concerned about his leg.  He is limping badly.  There is no broken skin or anything, so I am hoping that it is just a bad sprain rather than a break.  It doesn't appear to be on funny angles or anything and he does try to use it.  He just limps and can't take too much weight on it.

I spent a lot of time at Reptiles Inc this week.  I bought a new, smaller enclosure to keep Booster in while he is recovering.  Originally I had him in a large plastic container with heating and substrate set up so he would be comfortable.  I wasn't happy with that longer term as I think he could be separate from Lolly for a while.  So I went and bought a set up that while it is smaller, will be fine for him for a month or two.  Additionally the setup will do fine for in a little over a year when I am able to start keeping other critters.  I hope to get a species of children's python.  There are a few different types, so I will decide which one closer to the time.  I also have to have lost 25 kg by then as the python/s will be my reward.

For now, Lolly, as beautiful as she is, as you can see from the photo above, is in the bad books.  I am wondering if it all has to do with the mating season.  Booster has been displaying all the dominance signs to this point.  The attack from Lolly was completely out of character.  I'll just have to let Booster heal up and see how we go introducing him back into the Dragon's Den!

So Now We Know

JT had her 8th birthday part on the weekend.  Also her 8th birthday as it turns out.  We invited the usual collection of excited pre-teen girls that make up her friendship cohort over to celebrate.  What made the party even more special than the mere fact that JT was turning 8, was that we booked Pete from Reptiles Inc to do his fantastic educational show on his reptiles.

Needless to say we had a small collection of afore mentioned girls totally engrossed for the best part of an hour. The transfixed expressions broken only by wild fits of laughter and periodic squeals of delight.  Pete puts on a fantastic show.  Full of very useful information about our native reptiles and amphibians, all cunningly disguised with a mixture of good humour and great entertainment.  I can whole heartedly recommend him if you are in the Canberra region and you have a party coming up.  I believe he also visits schools in a similar manner.  In the show he put on for us, he presented everything from a green tree frog to a fresh water crocodile! There was loads in between and I for one learned a ton of new things about critters that I thought I was relatively well informed about.

Pete was also kind enough to take a look at our Dragons for me to determine their sex.....*insert drumroll*........ It turns out that we were right all along!  Booster is a boy and Lolly is a girl.  Pete was very complimentary of Lolly's colour and the condition of both Dragons.  Booster has had trouble with shedding skin on his tail and has a couple of points where it has constricted.  This is not uncommon and can lead to the part of his tail after the constriction to fall off.  This is in no way life threatening, merely aesthetically undesirable.  While he was here, Pete kindly removed the offending skin (which I had been too gentle with).  It proceeded to bleed a little which he said was a good sign as it meant there was still blood flow to the area.  It does mean that every time Booster sheds from now on, I will have to manually remove that portion of skin.  But over time I think I can learn to be proficient at it.

I'll finish today with a short video.  JT's little sister Danika loves to interact with the Dragons.  She has started getting involved with feeding time.  Keeping in mind, she is still only 2 years old, take a look at this video of her feeding Lolly a live cricket.

I weighed both Dragons the other day ready to post up the details, but, I will take another go at it as it was a week or so ago now.  Best to be accurate as at the time of posting.  Suffice to say, they are both doing very well :-).