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Jonathan's Jungle News!
Last updated 25th January 2012
News and important events in the lives of the
animals of Jonathan's Jungle Roadshow are reported
and updated here from time to time - feel free to
check back in the future to see what is happening in
Jonathan's animal collection! For more
information about any of the animals featured here,
follow the links to each animal's page by clicking
the
blue highlighted words
in the relevant text or where highlighted to do so.
**N.B. Older
news stories (and their page links) may refer to
animals which I no longer have in my collection so
please check the
Meet the Animals
page for correct & up-to-date information about the
animals in my current collection!
25th
January 2012
I have decided on a name
for my beautiful
Dumeril's boa and want to say a huge
thank you to everyone who suggested names!
Special thanks go to the BBC's Debra Hearne (who I
worked with during the BBC Live 'n' Deadly tour in
Autumn 2011) for the inspiration of giving him a
vanilla-themed name (due to vanilla being a major
export from the island of Madagascar). It
turns out that the name given to the type of vanilla
grown on Madagascar is Bourbon vanilla - as the
bourbon is also my favourite type of biscuit in the
world ever AND his base colour is even the same as a
bourbon biscuit, his name just had to be
BOURBON!! Other people suggested vanilla-based
names but Debra was the first, thanks Debs!
Bourbon has now been out on
his first couple of visits with me and everybody who
has met him so far has fallen in love with his
beautiful pattern and exceptionally calm
personality! For lots more information about
Bourbon and this wonderful but tragically endangered
snake species please click
here.
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The baby
gargoyle
geckos which hatched on New Year's Eve are doing
brilliantly and have already changed in terms of
colour and pattern despite only being three and a
half weeks old! One of them (the paler of the
two in the first newly-hatched picture dated 4th
January below) is already showing lots of yellow and
orange colouration as you can see below!
This
little one is already more orangey than its mum
Kluiverta was at the same age which, considering how
stunningly beautiful she turned out, definitely
makes this baby one to watch as s/he develops
further in the coming months! Kluiverta's
second pair of eggs are also due to hatch in a
couple of weeks, watch this space for more news as
and when it happens... In the meantime for
more baby pictures and for pictures of the parents
please click
here.
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4th
January 2012 A
very Happy New Year to everybody! I had a
fantastic start to 2012 when very late on New Year's
Eve I discovered my first ever newly-hatched
gargoyle
geckos!!
These gorgeous babies
hatched from the eggs laid by my beautiful female
Kluiverta on October 28th 2011, they therefore took
64 days to hatch. Despite having bred many
other gecko species for many years this was my first
attempt at breeding gargoyle geckos and I am
delighted to have been successful at the first
attempt! They are incredibly cute as you can
see here:
Despite
looking so very different from each other at
hatching, with one being dark brown and one being
pale grey, these next pictures (taken just 24hrs later
on New Year's Day) show them looking much more
similar!
Gargoyle
geckos, like many other geckos, can change colour
quite dramatically within a 24 hour period depending
on humidity, temperature, mood and many other
factors so these changes aren't particularly
surprising but are still fairly impressive!
For more pictures of the little ones, to read more
about their colour changing ability and to see the
stunning parent animals which have produced these
babies, please click
here.
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Regular visitors to this page will be familiar with
the amazing Smartie, my spectacular adult male Antilles pink toe
tarantula:
As reported here previously
Smartie matured in August 2011. Whilst I
was very disappointed to discover on maturing that
he was male, and therefore would only live a
relatively short
time as an adult, I was delighted when a friend of
mine who works at Bristol Zoo's Bug World asked if I
could consider lending them Smartie on a breeding
loan as they had an adult female but not a male! He
has been happily living at the zoo for several
weeks now and has been introduced to their female
three times, this picture showing one of these
pairings: 
It would be brilliant if Smartie's legacy (as well
as bringing so much pleasure to the many people who he
met during his time here) could involve him
fathering some babies, and we
have agreed to share any potential offspring as part of our
breeding agreement. There
is of course no guarantee of this but do watch this
space for any more news in the coming weeks...
For more information about Smartie and this species
in general please click here.
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Over the Christmas and New
Year period I took the opportunity of taking a few
up-to-date photographs of a few of my snakes!
For more information about any of the
individuals pictured here please click on their
names!
First up is
Half Pint the Sinaloan
milk snake, looking fabulous as I'm sure you'll
agree:
Next up is the gorgeous
King
Julian, my grey banded king snake:
Here we have
Puff the Western
hognose snake, the smallest snake in my
collection despite being fully grown and a very
interesting little chap!
Finally here is the
gorgeous Zuri, one
of my pair of Kenyan sand boas!
For more information about
all of these snakes, and the many other snakes which
make up my collection, please click
here!
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7th
December 2011
COMPETITION TIME - I NEED
YOUR HELP!!! I am looking for a name for my
beautiful
Dumeril's boa, also known as the Madagascan
ground boa, pictured here:
I usually like to give each
of my animals a name either relating to their
colour/pattern, their personality or a traditional
name from their country of origin, but I cannot
decide on a good one for this fabulous snake!
I have been trying to find
a traditional and suitable Malagasy name (Malagasy
is the main language of the people of Madagascar)
but so far I haven't found one I really like!
So it's over to you - maybe you think he should be
named after your favourite film character, a name to
do with his colour or pattern, a name to do with the
island of Madagascar or something else completely!
A few things to remember
are that he is a male (so no girls names!), he will
get a lot bigger than he is now and that he is also
an individual of a highly endangered species.
For much more information about him and his species
please click here.
The person who comes up with the winning suggestion
will get a mention on his webpage and may also receive a
discount voucher for a visit from Jonathan's Jungle
Roadshow (assuming of course that you are within an
area of the UK which I can realistically visit)! I will
very much look forward to your ideas, please email
jonathansjungle@btinternet.com with your
suggestion(s)!!
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2nd
December 2011
Since my last update I am
very happy to report that myself and
Mei-Ling, my gorgeous mandarin rat snake, have made a
very brief
appearance on television! The CBBC Live 'n'
Deadly show broadcast on BBC2 on Saturday November 26th
included footage from the recent Deadly
Days Out tour and I was delighted that a short clip of myself & Mei-Ling filmed at
the River Dart Country Park event on October 30th
2011
was used. Here it is, enjoy!
Video footage courtesy of
the BBC. For more information about the
brilliant Live 'n'
Deadly and Deadly Days Out please click
here.
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In other news my first ever baby
giant Florida katydid has
matured this week! The beautiful adult male
below only hatched 73 days ago and, whilst I always
knew they were a fast-growing species, for him to be
fully grown in just over ten weeks I find absolutely
remarkable!
To learn more about this
fantastic species, and to see lots more photographs
of them at different stages of their life cycle,
please click here!
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22nd
November 2011
I was absolutely delighted
to find two more newly hatched
crested geckos
late on Sunday evening!
These have hatched quite
late in the year but they certainly won't be the
last as I also found two more eggs whilst searching
the substrate of the enclosure of one of my breeding
groups! As you can see here they are quite
moist from the inside the egg when newly hatched and
they get bits of the incubation substrate
(vermiculite) stuck all over themselves!
They shed their skin soon
after hatching (and eat the entire skin) and look a
whole lot cleaner but just as cute!
It is quite tricky to get
photographs of two babies together due to how active
and jumpy they are, so I was pleased to get these
shots of them both earlier this afternoon!
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Also since my last update
the beautiful Mei-Ling my
mandarin rat snake has shed her skin and is
looking absolutely fabulous as you can see below!
She
continues to wow everybody she meets with her beauty
(including many thousands of people on the Deadly
Days Out tour (see below) and from these pictures it
is not hard to see why as she is an absolutely
stunning animal who I am delighted to have in my
collection!
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16th
November 2011
Very sadly the CBBC Live 'n' Deadly tour has now
ended, with the final 'Deadly Day Out' at Avenham
Park in Preston taking place on Sunday November
13th. I had such a great time working
at a total of seven of these events and it was an
enormous privilege to be involved. I worked
alongside some fantastic people during the Deadly
Days Out tour, including Steve Backshall and Naomi
Wilkinson (pictured with me below at the end of the
final event) as well as the whole of the superb BBC
team and many many others!
I would like to take this
opportunity to publicly thank the BBC Senior
Production staff (most of whom are pictured with
myself below) for inviting me to be a part of their
wonderful team!
These deadly days made many
thousands of children and their families very
happy indeed whilst leaving me with some brilliant
memories and many new friends including the other
members of the roaming animals team (below)!
Photographs courtesy of Samuel Jones
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In animal news this week I
have now decided on a name for my baby
Brazilian black tarantula.
I have had LOTS of great suggestions, both from
children (and adults) I have met in recent weeks and
also many received via email following the
announcement of the competition in the local press.
She will now be named... (drum roll)... Midnight!
Many thanks to Emma Gibbons and the rest
of the staff and children at Westlea Primary School's
breakfast and after school club for this great
suggestion!
As you can see from these
pictures of her (taken earlier on today) she is
still far from being the jet black colour which she
will end up being as an adult, but knowing how she
will end up looking I think that Midnight is a
perfect name for her! Of course I am saying
'her' more in hope than anything else, there is no
way at this stage to tell if 'she' is in fact a
female or not. This only becomes apparent much
later in a tarantula's development as anyone who
followed the story of my beautiful
Smartie the Antilles pink toe
tarantula will know!
I am actually expecting
Midnight to moult her exoskeleton fairly soon as she
is showing several signs of being in pre-moult.
Her abdomen is very swollen and has a dark, glossy
patch as well as the fact that her general colour
has faded considerably from the lovely dark
colouration she had following her first moult back
in early October (and reported here on October 6th)
- all sure signs of preparation to moult!
Watch this space for more news as and when it
happens...
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2nd
November 2011 Today
has been a great day for baby news! I have
found a new batch of about 20
giant Florida katydids and yet another brand new
batch of about 25
Peruvian
horsehead grasshoppers! Baby giant Florida
katydids have to be some of the cutest and most
beautiful baby insects ever, here is one of the
brand new ones which have hatched today!
Here
s/he is with one of his/her siblings which hatched just
seven weeks ago on September 15th (as also
pictured in the last news report dated October
25th), as you can see it is remarkable how quickly
these insects grow!
Whilst
the newly-hatched nymph might look tiny when
compared with its 7-week old sibling this is
nothing to how small it looks compared to its
mum, below! To think that within about four
months this tiny nymph is going to be as big as its
parents is truly an amazing thing!
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As well as this great baby
news I am delighted to say that since my last update
I have also seen the laying of my first ever pair of
gargoyle
gecko eggs!
These were laid on October
28th by Kluiverta, my beautiful orange blotched
female (below), who I have actually owned since she
was a tiny baby!
It is always lovely to
watch any animal grow and develop and then breed
successfully when the time is right, especially when
it is the first time I've bred a particular species!
The father to these eggs is Gollum, my striped male
(below):
Kluiverta's pair of eggs
seem fertile so hopefully I should be hearing the
pitter patter of tiny gargoyle gecko feet in early
2012, watch this space for further developments!
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If you would like to check back on any 'old'
news please use the links below!
News September - October 2011
News
July - August 2011
News May
- June 2011
News
March - April 2011
News January - February 2011
News from 2010
News from 2009
News from 2008
News from 2007
Adults, you can also keep up-to-date with
any animal-related news via the Jonathan's Jungle Roadshow Facebook
page:
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