There are a few books that are prized by chameleon keepers. And my pick for day 12 is two of the best! Both Chameleons of Africa by Colin Tilbury and Mader's Reptile Medicine and Surgery by Divers and Stahl are excellent parts of a chameleon keeper's library! They are high end books so chances are that the chameleon person in your life may not have picked them up yet! You can check them out here.
Today's pick is the Chameleon Forums 2020 Calendar which is made up from pictures of chameleons from our community! These are chameleons that you read about day to day on the Chameleon Forums. If you are not familiar with the forums then I encourage you to check out the Chameleon Forums and find a community that has been thriving since 2003!
UVB is critical to the health of our chameleons. Since we cannot see UVB light, the best way to ensure you have the right levels in your cage is to have a UVB meter. The Solarmeter 6.5 is the industry standard and is widely available. The Solarmeter 6.5 is a prized tool for any serious chameleon keeper and this makes an excellent gift for the chameleon person in your life!
Fogging is a new chameleon hydration technique for many people and is worth setting up. You don't have to change anything else about what you do to presently to give it a test run. But fogging is a great gift for the person wanting to explore chameleon husbandry at a deeper level.
A well lit chameleon enclosure makes for a happy chameleon and makes a beautifully planted cage possible! My pick for day 8 is the Arcadia Jungle Dawn LED bar which gives you that extra light that has allowed me to do crazy things like grow and bloom passion flowers in my chameleon cages!
The question commonly arises - how can I mount horizontal branches and live plants to the sides of my chameleon's screen cage? The Dragon Ledges were designed specifically for us chameleon keepers for that purpose! They consist of a brace that attaches to the aluminum screen frame and a "ledge" on the inside that transfer the weight to the brace and to the frame. The Dragon Ledges allow you to create a floating garden style cage interior that provides for your chameleon's needs!
If you have a chameleon or reptile enthusiast in your family then they may be difficult to shop for. Here is an easy solution! Ask them what their favorite YouTuber or Podcaster is and see if that influencer has a merchandise shop. You could find branded T-Shirts, hoodies, and coffee mugs that will be a surprise of a gift! And the bonus is that purchasing from a content creator's merchandise store supports the videos and podcast shows that are making our community so enjoyable and diverse.
Nutrition is of prime importance for us chameleon keepers and this requires a great deal of work in the care and keeping of our feeder insects. Those crickets coming from the pet store are likely empty shells and need to be fed to be useful! The Repashy Bug Burger product is a powder that can be tied with boiling water and will turn into a nutritious gelatin that can be cut into squares and fed to your feeder insects. This save enormous amounts of time! So I describe my Day 5 gift giving pick of Repashy Bug Burger!
Mountain Dragons is a photo journal recording the travels of Jan Stipala across the highlands of Kenya to document the chameleon species there. It is the most beautiful book we have in the chameleon community and is my day 3 pick for great gifts for people that love chameleons. This book is a wonderful one to cuddle up with and would actually be a great gift for anyone who enjoys reptiles or just wants to learn more about the natural world.
My choice for the second gift giving recommendation is a cup of Black Soldier Fly Larva! BSFL (as the are called) are a nutritious feeder that can give your chameleon diet variety. The bonus is that they start as grubs, which chameleons love, and turn into flies, which chameleons love! So, take a listen as to how you can treat that special chameleon in your life!
Join me for 12 days of chameleon gift recommendations where I publish one recommendation a day for the next 12 days!
My pick for day 1 of the Chameleon gift giving season is the Repti-Riser by Jason King of Kings Reptiles on Etsy. This innovative product provides an elegant solution to our problem of lifting UVB lights off the top of the cage!
Today we are going to talk about going into this holiday season thinking about the chameleon community. We’ll talk about how we can make a difference just by supporting the small business and content creators that are out there right now. You can even do meaningful support without spending money! Let’s care for our community like we care for our chameleon environments!
If you have an interest in reptiles and sharing that interest with others you can do so by joining the growing number of reptile educators and influencers. But you have to decide just what kind of influencer you want to be. In this episode I talk about what is involved in becoming a reptile community educator.
Today we are going to learn how to determine the sex of hatchling panther chameleons. It is tricky, but a skill that can be learned. Carolyn Laframboise from Frams Chams will be joining me and share with us her method of giving that ID to panther chameleons.
Today I talk with Jan Stipala about what kinds of environments Jackson’s Chameleons are found in. Jan is the author of Mountain Dragons which is our community’s most beautiful book on chameleons. To author this book he travelled the mountains of Kenya documenting the chameleon species there. But today will be strictly Jackson’s Chameleons. I wanted to know what the environmental conditions were like if one was to stand in their natural habitat.
Today I talk about the pregnancy period of the Jackson’s Chameleon to help you understand the steps before the babies are born. The live bearing nature of Jackson's Chameleons can be a mystery, but there are things that we can notice. In this episode I talk about the different stages of pregnancy in the Jackson's Chameleon.
Today I talk with the creative force behind the Neptune the Chameleon show on YouTube and Tik Tok. We talk about what it takes to put on show in good chameleon husbandry and what insights she has to the state of chameleon education on the frontier edge of social media platforms.
Those of us dedicated to the art of chameleon husbandry have recreating the ideal conditions as our primary goal. Determining ideal conditions starts with understanding the wild conditions our chameleon species developed within. But then it must be translated into an execution in our captive environment. Today I talk about how we extract ideal conditions from wild environmental data and what the limitations of doing that are.
Chameleon behavior is a window into what is going on in their lives. It is one of the ways they communicate with us if we have learned the language to hear what they are saying. Today I go over the basics of what behaviors mean. We will talk about the difference between a behavior that is showing an emotional issue and a behavior that is showing a medical condition.
Chameleons have cryptic ways about them. And being mysterious is how they survive. But being cryptic and mysterious also hides illness and that is what we chameleon keepers want to know about right away! Today I talk about the subtle first behavioral warning signs of illness in chameleons.
Good morning Chameleon Wranglers! Today we are continuing our conversation about chameleon cage type. Today we talk with Dr. Chris Anderson who shares his experiences in a wide range of conditions and why selecting glass sides enclosures was right for him.
Deciding on a cage type for your chameleon can be confusing. You hear that chameleons have to be in screen cages but you have all these advanced users using hybrid or even glass cages. Today I am talking with Jonathan Hill of iPardalis about why he chose to use hybrid caging for his breeding program.
The reptile community needs to be strong. And to accomplish that we need to be strong in our smaller communities. Whether chameleon, bearded dragon, green tree python, tarantula, or dart frog or all the others we need to maintain a strong specialized community while, at the same time, realizing we are part of a larger national and still larger global community. Today I am going to talk about what it takes for us to make our specialized communities strong.
Summer is approaching and it is time to take advantage of natural sunlight for your chameleons. Today we will talk about take your chameleon outside safely.