Baby Beardie Update

Over the past three days, the final three eggs of the first clutch have hatched. In all, we had 16 hatchlings, 15 of which are healthy. We had one that had some problems getting out of the egg and survived only a couple of days.

Here's a good picture to show scale:

At the other end of the spectrum, here is a picture of my niece holding Moiraine, the full-grown Mama-Dragon:

And the same neice with one of the hatchlings:

Our fifteen survivors are all doing great! They are eating fruit, veggies, and softened dry pellets, as well as improving their cricket hunting skills. They're also displaying some classic bearded dragon social behavior: Stacking!

They also tend to fight over the peak warm spots on the branch. Eventually, they all get comfortable.

Yesterday, we had one working on coming out of his shell all day. (This isn't unusual. We'd see them pipping when we got up in the morning, but they wouldn't come out of their shells until after we'd gone to bed that night.) For this particular dragon, we'll call him/her "Fifteen," I went to the reptile room around midnight and saw this:

You can see the "umbilical cord" in this picture. It's where the nutrition from the egg yolk enters the dragon's stomach to be metabolized. After they're hatched, they have a small wound there for a few days.

This is where he ended up after getting out and running off. (Those are the eggs from the second clutch--we'll have as many as a dozen hatchlings from that clutch in roughly a month.) I think it's kind of cool that in these pictures, he is next to actual bearded dragon eggs so you can see how much he had to be curled up to fit inside.

I pulled Fifteen out of the incubator and put him in the tank with the others. True to form, I got a lot of baby-beardie-attitude. (I'm extremely proud of this picture, by the way. It's probably the best photo I've taken of anything, ever.)

But after several minutes of trying to scare me away (to see how convincing he was, please refer to the first pictures on this post), he realized that the human being wasn't all that harmful, and we shared a moment before he joined the rest of his siblings. I don't know which one he is now.

So that's our dragon news! Thanks for sharing this adventure with us!