Recently suddenly loss our beautiful big girl Peppa the central bearded dragon ( hidden tumour on her liver ) , she was about 4 years old , 25" long and 800g and lived for snuggles and human contact .
A week or two after died a local breeder advertised that she had hatchling holdbacks (3 month olds) for sale and we decided to get a little boy and a little girl.
We decided to name them Cleopatra and Caesar.
Cleopatra has been a snuggle queen since the getgo and loves / demands now that I hand feed her , and she LOVES crickets and BSFL & silkworms. Not so keen of her greens .
Caesar is our new little livewire , not so keen on being picked up , or touched , but after a months of so of patience he finally trusted me enough to let me pet him In the rearing tub when he's relaxed , and lately he's been letting me pick him up and give him a brief daddy snuggle in my hands or on my chest / tummy , and I'm now handfeeding some of his worms (BSLF & silkworms to him to bond more with him. He initially loved crickets but as soon as I started feeding him silkworms , that was all he wanted , yep, he's a silkworm junkie !
So here they are 3 months later :
Caesar has been only interested in only one meal per day ( 2 large silkworms ) and has been favouring preferring to curled up in the cool end under some paper sheets, so I've installed a second heatslab ( set to hold 28 degC ) in the cool zone & installed a cool zone hide (another acrylic fake log) for him and he loves it , as does Cleo.
Been very cold weather here the last couple of weeks : there was snow only 100km away on the Barrington Tops for a fews days last week. Been lucky to crack 18 degrees C in the days , but windy-as and windchill makes it feel like 5 degrees C , was 8 degC overnight here last night ( Tasman Sea Cyclone off coast up near Coffs Harbour )
Caesar has decided he doesn't mind snuggles on me sometimes now.
Group snuggle - yep - this two like being tucked in under my tshirt too.
Cleo is at front.
Cleo is now 47.9g (+2.5g gained this week) ==> 4.79x
Decided she likes silkworms too. But still mostly taking large BSFL by hand along with some 2/3 size crickets.
Cleo likes a sleep-in but is always up by brekky , and will stay awake most days basking on her bit of bark or ontop the warm hide til 8pm.
Caesar is now 87.8g (+6.9g gained this week) ==> 5.89x
Has decided he doesn't mind some of his insects given by hand, still only really interested in silkworms , but he's had his first superworm and LIKED IT !! and also prefers his crickets by hand, discovered large woodies, I think he liked them more than crickets.
Caesar is my early riser , he's up with the lights when they switch on about 6am. But he crashes about 5pm.
Been doing a bit more bonding (handfeeding and snuggles) with Caesar , he kinda puts up with this but would rather not ATM.
Although the breeder told us this pair came from the same clutch of eggs , I suspect Cleo is about 2 weeks younger than Caesar , that's fine . So far they seem to really like being together , and Cleo despite being smaller than Caesar appears to be the boss dragon ( she always takes the best basking spot , and is very assertive with him , she'll bulldoze him off her favorate basing spot if he's there and she wants to use it.
My current scale children are :
Cleopatra and Caesar juvenile central bearded dragons ( estimate 6 months old ).
George and Mildred my 10 year old pair of eastern bluetongue skinks.
Fluffy my rescued eastern water skink (about 4 years old)
Godzilla the hatchling G'hyra Dubia gecko ( under 1 month old ).