Crickets and sun for scaly creatures
ON Christmas Day, Julie Graham will be taking photos of her guests wearing Santa hats.
The guests are eight bearded dragons, a couple of chameleons and Splinter, a hedgehog.
“I send the pictures to their mommies,” she says.
“They miss their pets and the photos set their minds at ease.”
It’s not easy to get a bearded dragon to pose for a photo but Graham has had years of practice — she’s been running the Lazy Lizzard Lodge, a “kennel” and rescue centre for reptiles in Kloof, Durban, for a decade.
This year Graham’s shortterm Christmas residents are a tame bunch. “I don’t have any snakes this year,” she says. “And you missed the two alligators; they went back home.”
Graham has her regular customers and takes in a variety of animals over the holiday season. It brings in some of the income needed to run her rescue and rehabilitation centre.
Her home is a petting zoo of scaly-skinned creatures — at any one time she has more than 50 bearded dragons, monitors, iguanas, chameleons, lizards, snakes, frogs and hedgehogs.
Many have been injured, or are ill. Bastion, for example, is a bearded dragon that lost two feet and lives happily with Missy, who has poor eyesight.
“I’ve always loved different animals and always wanted reptiles. Years ago, when I saw my first iguana, I had to have one.”
An abandoned chameleon followed and as the word spread, so she began to take in rescues.
Graham’s favourite is Tyson, a lizard that loves to be stroked and who she has occasionally taken to bed with her.
“But that’s when my husband says, ‘I’m out of here’.”
Running a lodge for lizards is hard labour. “We have to clean the cages daily, the reptiles need to be bathed regularly, but only on hot days, and they need to get into the sun often. They live on a diet of crickets — I get a delivery every week and they cost a fortune — and I supplement their diet with carrots, butternuts and greenery.
“It’s a 24-hour job. They are the last things I see before I go to bed and I am up and checking on them at 5.30am.”
Graham says she will spoil all her babies on Christmas Day. “Everyone will get a treat; watermelon for the reptiles and Splinter the hedgehog will get an extra scoop of mealworms.”
Also dishing out treats will be Danie Delport from Pretoria, who specialises in chinchillas — small furry creatures resembling a cross between a rabbit and squirrel. There is a growing awareness of chinchillas and people are adopting them as pets, says Delport. “Chinchillas are from semi-arid desert but can thrive here.”
He will pet-sit about six pairs of chinchillas for his clients.