Attacks and anecdotes: The occupational hazards of working with wild animals…

Ok so since the last time it has been a bit of a week for minor injuries and assault!!

The victim: ME

The Culprits:

Bearded dragon & European eyed lizard– This was actually an accident on my part. Beardies are usually really friendly and practically never bite, but the one I look after, named Bramble, is sick and so I have to encourage him to feed by putting the food in his mouth for him. Basically I wasn’t using feed tongs (and should have been) and lost my concentration for a second when Fyf and Ceris came on for a chat and my finger went in his mouth!!! I was really surprised how the teeth cut through my finger like a hot knife through butter- I thought it would have been a more jagged laceration. And the bite power was unbelievable!! I thought that the side of my finger bitten would all die back because lizard bite almost always means infection due to the virulent bacteria that live in their mouths, but it kept quite clean and hardly bled at all. However the venom in the saliva meant the pain of the bite kept me awake all night! It’s healing really well now though. And as for the eyed lizard (pictured above, having a cuddle with the bearded), that was an accident too! He's very old and can't see very well so you have to hold the hoppers and locusts still for him with tongs so he can grab them, He is very sensitive to movement and so runs biting towards any movement he sees, just in case it's a meal. So while I was helping the beardy to eat, the eyed rushed up, leapt in the air and grabbed the back of my hand!

Clown fish – Oh yes! Nemo is not such a nice character!! Turns out this particular ‘nemo’ is incredibly territorial over a certain rock in one of the tanks I have to service, and proceeded to batter, ram and bite me when I cleaned the rock!! And I’m talking about a fish who’s body size is smaller than a hamster!!

Fox – This was luckily nothing major, thanks to the heavy gauntlets I was wearing, and that it was my little finger, which shrinks away inside the gloves. The fox on question is called Rusty. Me and Ceris are training, or rather, attempting to tame, her and her sister Miller. After long and patient sessions with them, Miller is progressing really well, but Rusty has turned rather vicious, though we hope she will go the other way eventually and become a really good animal. So she caught me out a couple of times while I was catching her up.

Monkey – Again, this wasn’t so serious due to the gloves and small size of the monkey, Lilley, a young rhesus macaque monkey, being trained with her sisters but Ceris and Fyf. I agreed to assist even though I HATE and am rather unnerved (yes, even a little frightened, perhaps) by monkeys. Like the foxes, these little’uns are in fairly early stages of their training, so are still rather snap happy, and because I’m not used to working with this kind of animal, I’m pretty useless with them and am still building my confidence!!

Pigeon – Ah Baldric, how I missed you!!! Some of you may already know of, or have met, or indeed been attacked yourself by my little white terror, who lived with my in my room at uni while I reared him from chick to randy, frustrated, territorial adulthood!! Last Sunday I got him out and put his leash on (a long string tied to one leg, the other end fixed to my trousers, so he can fly but has to always come back to me, as he isn’t trained properly anymore), so he spent all day up to 4pm on my shoulder, and amazingly, wasn’t that badly behaved, although he did bite and ravage quite a lot, but while I was cooking lunch in my trailer I fell asleep on the sofa and he fell asleep on my head on one leg (so I was told!)

Llama – Another old favourite, who I used to work with all the time, Larry. Never spat on my in his life, but on Sunday felt the need to cover me (and baldric) in his partially digested breakfast, shot from his moth and stinging high speed!

Iguana – Mantel (although the one in the pic is George, my big male, looking very chilled out with a plated lizard on his head), named after Dr Gideon Mantel, the man who named the first ever dinosaur discovered (it was his wife who actually found the tooth) - Iguanadon- due to the resemblance of its teeth to those of a modern day iguana), has the tendency to launch out of his tank, sometimes at waist height, sometimes at head height out of his tree, onto me. I’m trying to do this with him every day so he gets handled more, because he is still young, measuring about 1.5m, and a bit feisty. Anyway, one day last week he went right for my head and ran up on top and started clawing my head, and for once I wasn’t wearing my cap! Scabby head all round (v painful in the shower!). The thing about iguanas is that their claws are unbelievably sharp, and so even without them meaning to, you get loads of little scratches when andling them, especially as they prefer to climb up high on your body to feel more secure. The other thing is that they must carry thousands of nasty bacteria under their nails because the smallest of nicks from these bad boys seem to get inflamed and really irritate. Nice.

Kingsnake – California Kingsnake to be precise. Usually an easy customer, but due to film work and jobs, this poor snake hadn’t had a meal for about three weeks (if you handle/work a snake the day after it's had a meal it gets tummy ache and/or throws up) tried to top up his water! Cunning Grace had however, predicted the attack and was armed with a snake hook to defend the hand doing the watering!! You can’t really be surprised with the snakeys getting a bit peeved now and again, after all, big scary hands are invading their home and territory. I’d probably snap too, infact, I do in my trailer sometimes, I’m sure!!

So the lessons learned are that animals will and do bite the hand that feeds them, but more often than not when we are messing with them, which is fair enough, I reckon.

We’ve had more new arrivals, a male mandrill baboon was born a couple of weeks ago and is doing really well, he’s the first surviving baby mandrill we’ve had before, so it’s really great news.

I had a new baby bearded dragon delivered in the mail last week, named Phoenix. He’s so cute!!

And last but by no means least, the most exciting news of my year so far…. I hatched my first snake last night!!!!!!!!! I am so proud as have never hatched a reptile before. A little bullsnake poked it’s snout through the egg shell yesterday and this morning had fully emerged, looking surprisingly big, full bodied and feisty! I have high hopes that 4 or 5 more of the eggs will hatch in the next few days from a total clutch size of about 15. I’ve kept it secret until I feel more confident about it and the others survival as I don’t want everyone rushing in and disturbing the unhatched eggs, or the hatchling, but tonight I’ll go in after work and ‘re-pot’ it into an individual tank, and stick around for my days off to keep a close eye on the others. Snakelets can take up to 3 days to emerge from their eggs when they hatch and ‘helping’ them out of their shells prematurely can actually be really damaging to them.

UPDATE: Nw have 6 bouncing baby snakes!!! 2 of them are really mean! It's amazing how they have individual tendencies (dare I say it, 'personalities') from the moment they hatch.

Also forgot to mention, went to a medaeival festival a week or so ago, at Berkley castle in Gloscestershire. It was really good fun, a big event, with everyone in costume, food, story telling, cannon and archery demonstration, sword play classes, music, horseback jousting, a live village camp, the lot... here's a few pics from the event:

Cut my trailer-mate Sam's hair into a mohiecan on the weekend, too, it looks so cool!!

This weekend (well, Thur) I'm off to the Hell Angels Bulldog Bash festival in Stratford upon Avon with my sisiter Daisy for 4 days, then a couple of days doing up my car in Cambridge with Dad and then a few days in Scotland visiting my frind from uni, Phil. Man, I've got to get better at updating this blog with pics and stuff!!

Adios amigos!! xx