Houses for Lizards

One of the fun things about having fancy reptiles is building fancy reptile enclosures.  Grendel, being the sensitive snowflake beast that she is, required a fancy house right off the bat.  So we built her a terrarium complete with live plant.  Let me give you a rundown.

First, we bought this awesome tank off Craigslist.  Don’t get me started on the joys of front-opening terrariums.  We’ll never go back to the standard take-the-top-off-and-fish-around-for-angry-lizard variety.

We got a piece of cork bark, and glued it to the back, for esthetics and also to provide a naturalistic climbing surface.  They sell these at pet stores—we weren’t being terribly original.  But still.

 Add some dirt and a hardy plant.  And some moss to make it pretty and trap in moisture.

Of course, climbing structures are necessary.  We gave her a fancy stick and this sweet little Styrofoam fake mushroom ledge thingy. 

 It had to dry overnight so the noxious epoxy fumes wouldn’t suffocate our darling dearest gecko-face.

Baba Yaga came to help.  She wanted to eat the orange dirt packaging.

 

We gave her a banana instead. 

Bananas are like ice cream for tortoises.  That look of disgust is actually pure, unadulterated joy.  Or at least, I choose to believe as such.

Add one fancy lizard, and you’re set!

I must say, we’re pretty proud of this lizard house.  She loves the mushroom ledge, and spends most of her time hanging partway off it like a gargoyle.  Creepy little lizard.  I think Grendel was a good name for her--she's quite the monster.

 A few weeks later, we decided that the need to update Sydney's pathetic living space was getting desperate.  So we picked up the wide and squat version of Grendel's new home.  No process pictures for this one, but we think it's a keeper.

Sydney seems about a thousand times happier now.

Especially if by "happy" you mean "buried".  I'm pretty sure that in skink language, they're synonyms.

Yay, reptiles!