Introducing Flick and our new vivarium

The last thing a cricket ever sees!

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last week, my life has been turned upside down, or at least my work life!

So I have decided to do a few posts today in order to make up for it. I want to cover the new vivarium and some of the steps we went through in order to create a new background.

So after a few months, around June 2010, we decided that Smudge was getting a little too large for the original habitat, and we decided to buy a larger vivarium.

The original plastic vivarium (I'm going to shorten this to viv from now on, ok?) was pretty low and pretty narrow front to back, so we could rest it on our shelving unit with no problems at all. We decided to get a larger viv which would allow us to add more branches and foliage for Smudge to climb on/around.

So we went off to Southern Aquatics in Poole again (link below) with Mother-in-law and Brother-in-law in tow and looked for a nice large viv.

We settled on a 60cm by 45cm by 45cm Glass Terrarium with front opening double doors, simply to make it easier to re-arrange the foliage / hides etc instead of taking off the top each time like the plastic viv. It had mesh on the top for ventilation and came with a polystyrene background shaped and coloured to look like a rock face.

While we were at Southern Aquatics, my mum-in-law saw a tangerine albino leopard gecko and fell in love with it. We debated how well the gecko would fit in with the 4 dogs, 2 cats, hamster etc that mum-in-law had, but she eventually decided to get it and named him ( we checked, it was a he, not like smudge where for 3 months we weren't quite sure!) Flick.

(Unfortunately we haven't got any pictures of Flick: the early years, so the picture you see above is much more recent.)

We all decided that Flick should get the old plastic viv that we got with Smudge and that as we already had most of the supplies to care for a gecko, mum-in-law did not need to get a starter pack but instead should only get a couple of hides, a thermometer and a water dish. we also bought a (bigger) heat mat for our new viv. When we got home we realised the new viv would not fit on the same shelf as the old tub, so I had to move one of the shelves down to accommodate Smudges new home (thank goodness for DIY shelf units!).

Ok so next post will be regarding Flick settling in and the setting up of Smudges new home.

Link to Southern Aquatics:

http://southernaquatics.co.uk/

The Terrarium we actually bought:

http://www.exo-terra.com/en/products/natural_terrarium_medium.php

And here it is available at Southern Aquatics. When we got it it was £55, which is pretty good considering its RRP is £111.59!

http://southernaquatics.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=38_69_84&products_id=522