We thought it would be fun to start a little news section here on the website to journal what we are up to. So we will start now, near the end of May!

In our indoor terraria for the past several weeks, many lizards have been breeding and laying eggs, and many eggs have been hatching. Outdoors, the weather has been cool and cloudy, and so not much has been happening in our outdoor terraria yet this year. The past few days have been cool and rainy with temperatures in the 50s and 60s. Today, we are finally above 70. Looking at the forecast, it will finally begin warming up a little later this week. Each year is different!

Meanwhile, indoors lately we have been hatching:

• Our famous Green Forest Dragons (Calotes calotes)
• Electric Blue Day Geckos (Lygodactylus williamsi)
• Neon Day Geckos (Phelsuma klemmeri)
• Our exceptional “Hawaiian Blue” Gold Dust Day Geckos (Phelsuma laticauda)
• Crested Geckos (Correlophus ciliatus)
• Gargoyle Geckos (Rhacodactylus auriculatus)
• The first Collared Lizards of 2026 (Crotaphytus collaris) have hatched with more on the way.
• The first Green Water Dragons (Physignathus cocincinus) we have hatched since 2013. We are excited to be working with these beautiful lizards again!
• Finally, our first-ever Ackies (Varanus acanthurus) hatched a couple of weeks ago! We are excited because, although we have bred many lizards, these Spiny-Tailed Monitors are our first-ever breeding of Varanids! 

Also, this month, we kicked off our summer season of educational presentations around our home state of Virginia. We’ve done these shows for decades now, and they keep us pretty busy traveling during the first half of the summer.

We brought our lizards to our local elementary school for a few hours on a couple of mornings last week and had a great time sharing them with several classes of kids each morning. We use different formats depending on the group’s age and size. For this elementary school, each class got to spend about 30 minutes with us. We split each class into small groups of several children, and every 10 minutes, they rotated through stations where they got up close and personal with the animals, learning about them while they observed, touched, held some of them, and asked lots of questions and got lots of answers!

This week, we will spend a couple of days visiting several libraries about 30-50 minutes away with our scaly ambassadors! 

We feel like this kind of “hands-on” experience with these animals is so important for people, especially young people, so they can relate with the natural world and appreciate and care about it.

Lastly, we have finally begun adding individual crested and gargoyle geckos to our online catalog here on the website. Taking individual photos and organizing them is a time-consuming process, and we are only beginning! We have many more to add in the coming weeks and months, so be sure to check them out!