Livestock Update

I've been meaning to write about the additions to our little family for quite a while now.

It all started with a salamander. I don't mean a little salamander. He is about six inches long, and he has been living on my kitchen counter, in one of those huge plastic Costco Ginger Snaps containers, for several months. Number One found him in a screen on a sprinkler line, and amazingly he was still alive. He was young, so he still had gills. Since moving to our kitchen counter, he has lost his gills. He subsists on a steady diet of elm beetles, grasshoppers, worms (his favorite!) and the occasional freeze-dried cricket.

According to the Division of Wildlife website, he is a Tiger Salamander. He has yet to be named. He usually has a nice habitat with rocks and sticks in addition to the water, but Salamander has a tendency to get quite stinky, and every once in a while we need to change the rocks in addition to the water. We just haven't gotten around to getting him some new rocks yet. Don't worry, it's on the list.

A month or two later, we acquired an Eastern Collared Lizard. He had previously been caught in one of our desert corrals, and adopted by Ranch Hand's grandson. The boy took the lizard home to the Big City, put him in the aquarium with his other lizards, and the Collared Lizard ATE all the boy's other (store-bought) lizards. Shame on you, Collared Lizard. So Ranch Hand brought the lizard home to the ranch to an ecstatic H-Bomb.


CG bought the Collared Lizard a "reptile box" which is a glorified plastic shoe box, with holes in it and a lid with a trap door. Some day Collared Lizard will get a bigger home all his own. But for now, he resides in the box, high out of reach of Sawed Off. We asked CG to bring home some live crickets, but she could only find freeze-dried. Collared Lizard will not eat freeze-dried anything. He scooped all the freeze-dried crickets, as well as a piece of bread H-Bomb gave him, into a pile in the middle of his box, as if to say "won't someone take out this garbage?"

Every couple nights, we all go outside and catch live grasshoppers for the spoiled thing. And then we watch him eat them. It is quality entertainment. I don't know what we will do for him when grasshopper season is over.

During our camping trip, H-Bomb wanted to catch another lizard, and after the larger lizard Number One had caught inadvertently escaped his temporary coffee can home, we were determined to catch another one to appease H-Bomb, distraught that his new pet was gone! After much effort, and a Corona or two, we managed to catch a little baby lizard. Who for obvious reasons cannot possibly live with Collared Lizard. So Baby Lizard also has a home of His Own, in a huge plastic Costco Animal Crackers container. (what the world did before huge plastic Costco containers, I will never understand). Baby Lizard eats...what else?...baby grasshoppers. (as you can see, he does not eat ladybugs, or grasshoppers that are too big).


I'm not sure what species Baby Lizard is...and please understand that none of these beasts have been named, I am just capitalizing them because I have nothing better to do.