Outdoor Smallwoods Knight Anole Enclosure | Chuck Horne

Speaker:
We’ll do a little overview on the outdoor night anole enclosure, which is a sun-catcher fly catch from customcages.com. It is six foot tall. I have it unlatched, the wind’s blown the door open there. It’s six foot tall, almost 36 inches deep by about 30 inches wide. I think I’ve talked about before when I did the big enclosure that the spiny-tailed iguanas are in.

A fly catch is designed to provide a secure entry and exit point into a aviary so that the birds don’t fly past you, and I actually use it in that capacity for the spiny-tailed iguanas because they’re so fast, but these guys– Let’s see. My little girl is right there. There’s the female and all the small with eye, and the male was just over here on the other side of the feeding dish a moment ago.

Oh, there he is. There’s the male. Let’s see if I can get him up here so we can get a good look at him without getting bit. There he is. Beautiful. But it is half inch mesh. You can get these in various sizes. I think one inch mesh is the standard, which is it was for an aviary for large parrots, but I wanted something a little bit smaller. I do have the top covered, and I’m using a inverted concrete mixing tub, and I just got it flipped over. I do have a ceramic heat emitter for auxiliary heat at night, if it gets a little cool.

We are experiencing some rather– I don’t know if you can see that, but 74 ̊. Here, it is almost mid July in South East Virginia, it is a kind of cool late afternoon. Cypress mulch is on the bottom. I have three potted plant setups, we have corn plants and palm and another type of– I don’t know if that’s a corn plant in the back, or a dracaena. I don’t know if I’m saying that right.

Each one of them has pothos in the plants with them. That way, if the female is laying eggs, which I believe she is, she has plenty of opportunity, plenty of nesting sites. I did struggle a little bit with the way to feed them out here to make sure they got insects, and the bad thing is ants go to it too, but that’s some crickets, some super worms, I got some blueberry chunks, and a couple small chunks of repashy grub pie in there, but I just suspended it on a piece of pvc, and it’s got holes drilled in it in case it rains, the water’ll drain out.

But I was a little worried that they weren’t getting enough to eat, but they do take grub pie from here. It’s just a struggle chasing them around, or getting them to bite the grub pie, in this slightly larger enclosure, but plenty of purchase form to be on. The back of it is coco fiber mat, and you can tell. I mean, see how it’s drupping down. Probably the weather, and if it gets wet, it’s going to deteriorate a little bit, so I will probably have to replace that.

Hopefully it lasts through the season, because it’s going to be pretty tough to replace it with all of the plants in the way and the decorations in the way, but I wanted to provide a visual barrier between the knight anoles and the spiny-tailed iguanas. I don’t want anybody to lose a tail-tip or a toe, climbing on the back, and getting a little feisty with them. Let’s go around this way a little bit, see my boy. He’s a little flighty in there. I don’t know if you guys can see where he went.

The sun’s back behind me. I think it’s about 5 0’clock. Oh, there he is right there. Now he is on the back wall, behind the coco fiber mat. That’s not ideal, hopefully he comes back out before Basque or  notices him and decides to go over there and mess with him. I might have to work on that here in a minute, but this is a very well constructed enclosure, has a very sturdy latch. I do lock it up, I do put a padlock on it.

I put a padlock, obviously I lock it right there. The front side, the two sides are, like I said, half inch coated aluminum mesh. In the back is actually ¾ inch, the same size as Bosque and TMET’s main enclosure. Let’s come around back here, and here the air conditioner, sorry about that. There he is, I see him. Oh boy. Let’s see how that goes, hopefully he comes back out and gets back in his main enclosure.

I do have a Mistking misting system set up out here. There’s one nozzle in the corner there and there’s one in the other corner, and I also went ahead and used black pond spray foam to fill in these fairly wide gaps. I didn’t do that because I was worried about the adults getting through, but just in case a baby hatches. They could probably get through this, but some of them were wide, so I had to go ahead and fill in the gaps. Let me see.

Can’t really tell from this angle, but this is– I’m kicking stuff back here on the back patio. Well, let’s see, we’ll get a little better view, back up a little bit. There it is. That is a fly catch modified to be an arboreal tropical terrarium, excuse me, outdoor enclosure, for a pair of anolus. Haven’t been uploading in a while, busy couple of weeks for me.

A lot of stuff going on, end of June, July. I just wanted to give you guys just a real quick heads up on what’s going on here. Stay tuned for more to come about the outdoor enclosure and all my other critters that I have. Until next time, take care.

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