It took me a while to find these, but I was inspired by a certain
picture of a crocodile monitor. I've embedded the small version, but you can click on the attachments in the text to see the large versions.
- Gabriel, a truly handsome fellow.
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This is Gabriel. He was a male Black-throated Monitor from Tanzania. (I always claimed him to be
V. albigularis ionidesi, but that was largely because I liked the sound of it. Last time I heard - which was a very long time ago now, I admit, so the situation might have changed - 'ionidesi' was not considered a valid sub-species.)
- I had a hard time getting good pictures of Gabriel. he'd always swing his head around to see what I was doing.
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I bought Gabe from a reptile store in Melbourne, Florida in 1994, when he was approximately 6 months old. He was imported - the last imported monitor I would buy as a pet.
At the time, Gabe was about 16 inches long, but he grew quickly to more than 5 feet and then more slowly until he was just over 6.5 feet long. (All lengths are total. I never bothered to write down his snout-to-vent lengths for some reason.)
- Gabriel basks on "his" porch.
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For most of his life with me, Gabriel lived on my mother's back porch. My mother was, at the time, a long-distance truck driver - so I stayed in her house and kept it up while she was gone for months at a time. The back porch was 12 feet by 20 feet and once we'd reinforced the screen walls with 20-gauge welded wire it was perfect for Gabe. (We decided to reinforce the screens when he accidentally took out a wall by walking through it - without apparently noticing it was there.)
- Gabriel, using the cages I built for the Savannah monitors and iguanas as his own personal throne.
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At maximum size, Gabriel weighed a bit over 50 lbs, which my vet told me was a bit chubby. It's really hard not to give treats to a six-foot lizard, though - not when he sits up and begs for them, then snaps the mice out of the air like popcorn. Yes, he got pre-killed mice as treats. His normal food varied but included rats, chicks, fish, and a disgusting mix of raw ground turkey, vitamins and minerals. He also got insects when I could find some for sale big enough for him to bother with. Watching him run after crickets was always fun.
- Gabriel catches some sun while out for a walk in the back yard.
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I often took Gabriel out for walks on his leash ... or rather, he took me for walks. Trying to teach him to heel did not go over well with him. And unfortunately we could really only walk around our fenced back yard - I was too nervous about losing him if a neighbor complained. The legal system doesn't always work to the benefit of big lizards, no matter how sweet they are.
And Gabriel was sweet. He loved people. He loved to be petted and made a fuss over. My mother's friends would sometimes bring their kids over to see him - shoot, even a Jehovah's Witness who came to visit me one day came back with his kids the next week. I'd keep his head under one arm and his tail under the other and let them touch his back, or sometimes a foot. The restraints never felt necessary, but you don't take chances when dealing with other people's children.
- Gabriel gets ready to leave on a trip. That's not actually his travel crate in the background - his was much larger.
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Every so often I'd take him to a herp society meeting in Orlando. We'd sit in the back away from people so no one felt cornered but people could come up to us if they wanted. Gabe really hated the ride, though. Even in his travel crate he didn't do well with starts and stops in the car. So we didn't go that often.
I don't take good pictures, so I don't have that many of him. But at one point I saw a local photographer who did pet portraits, so after calling him and verifying that it wouldn't be a problem, I took all the lizards in to be photographed. We tried really hard to get Gabe to sit still, but he wanted to explore the room. We did eventually get some good shots of him trying to get out of the chair we posed him in, though.
- Gabriel is not so happy to have been dumped in the boring chair again. He wants to poke around the room.
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- He does consent to one good picture, though ...
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- ... before taking matters into his own hands and leaving.
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When my mother gave up driving and I went back to college, Gabe went to live with a friend of mine at Cypress Gardens. He got to be in some of the shows and became one of Bruce's traveling menagerie of animals that toured elementary and middle schools along the east coast. I lost track of Bruce and Gabe for awhile - unfortunately caught up in my career - and lost the contact info to get back in touch. When I ran into Bruce at a reptile show a few months back, I learned that Gabriel had caught pneumonia and died several years ago.
- *kiss*
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I can only imagine how hard it must have been to learn of his passing, but it sounds like he had a fantastic life and you're lucky enough to have all those wonderful memories of him.
COOL! Haha nice pictures, I want a pet like that aswell
Scary