Last year was the year of the “Leopard”. We expanded our baby leopard gecko enclosures by about 100%! While we were popping at the seams with leopards, for some reason, our crested geckos decided to almost shut down. We had about 1/3 the number of babies in ’09 as we did in ’08! Good in that we had our hands full with the leopard but not for our goal of producing some beautiful crested geckos.
So far this year, we are back on track with our cresties (I attribute last year’s decrease to weird weather). With holdbacks and an increase in the number of groups we are keeping, we are now running out of room in our crestie area. At this point, mid-summer, we are completely out of room and have MANY eggs ready to hatch in the next month (sales have been great- just producing more babies!).
It’s time for some construction. As you may know from following our blog, we are now out of space in the facility. So we will be taking two routes to providing more space- 1) more efficiency and 2) expanding outside the gecko room!
We keep many babies (hatchling to about 1 month of age) in kritter keepers. These take a lot of time when feeding and a lot of extra space with their tops. I’m designing a new stand to double capacity without losing any space for each crested. As well, since we are holding back many animals now, we need more ‘grow-out’ space. The only place to go with new racks is OUT… into other areas of the house. For years I’ve avoided this but at this point there is no other choice.
Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks to see how we build our New-Born Crestie rack and where we build the Grow-Out rack (and if Nanette allows this option!).
