E
eric
Guest
First of all, This is a great site! I've been prerusing it for at least a couple of hours, gathering information. My name is Eric and I live in Nashville, Tennessee.
Secondly, I want to state that I learned my lessons years ago as a pre-teen, wanna-be herpetologist about trying to take reptiles and amphibians out of the wild and keep them in captivity. A few poor critters never made it out of my terrarium alive, even though I always had success raising tadpoles (and releasing them as frogs). I agree that wild things are best left in the wild, especially when they are adults and have spent most of their lives that way. Yet at the time and under the circumstances, this seemed the correct thing to do.
Late one afternoon a few weeks ago I was sitting on the back steps of the factory where I work when I spotted a small Red Eft at the edge of the grass, seemingly about to venture out across the large asphalt parking lot. It apparently had crawled out from inside the pipeline housing which runs underneath the building's foundation. It was cold and windy out and getting colder, and he/she was moving very slowly. The forecast called for cold temperatures over the next several days, so I didn't think it was going to survive if it tried to cross the parking lot. A bird or stray cat would get it if it didn't freeze or dry out, I thought. So I gently scooped it up and put it in a clear plastic bottle with a couple of capfulls of rainwater and took it home. The following Saturday I set up a terrarium in one of our spare 10 gallon tanks with aquarium gravel across the bottom, with a layer of potting soil covered by terrarium moss over about two-thirds of the tank. There is a water dish with a potted plant in there as well as several moist chunks of spongy, decaying wood. It seems to like hiding inside one of the hollow knotholes of one of the wood chunks.
My concern is this. It was full and fat when I found it, two days later while still in the bottle, it excreted a large stool and has been skinny ever since. I bought a dozen baby crickets, yet many seemed too big for it to eat. This little eft is only about two and a half inches long. I have also been dropping gnat-sized flies and unidentified aphid-like insects in there when I catch them. There are no live bugs in there now. Is there any way to know that it is eating?
Some good news... it didn't look as skinny when I peeped in on it this morning. I hope it wasn't just my imagination.
More good news... I raise night crawlers in a cooler in the garage. They have reproduced in there and I'm hoping there are some inch-long babies in there that I can try dropping in the tank. Silly me... I didn't think they liked worms! I read elsewhere on the links that they will eat cut up worms as well. Not meaning to answer my own question here, is there any to discreetly feed a potentially spooked Newt?
Any advice/tips will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Eric
Secondly, I want to state that I learned my lessons years ago as a pre-teen, wanna-be herpetologist about trying to take reptiles and amphibians out of the wild and keep them in captivity. A few poor critters never made it out of my terrarium alive, even though I always had success raising tadpoles (and releasing them as frogs). I agree that wild things are best left in the wild, especially when they are adults and have spent most of their lives that way. Yet at the time and under the circumstances, this seemed the correct thing to do.
Late one afternoon a few weeks ago I was sitting on the back steps of the factory where I work when I spotted a small Red Eft at the edge of the grass, seemingly about to venture out across the large asphalt parking lot. It apparently had crawled out from inside the pipeline housing which runs underneath the building's foundation. It was cold and windy out and getting colder, and he/she was moving very slowly. The forecast called for cold temperatures over the next several days, so I didn't think it was going to survive if it tried to cross the parking lot. A bird or stray cat would get it if it didn't freeze or dry out, I thought. So I gently scooped it up and put it in a clear plastic bottle with a couple of capfulls of rainwater and took it home. The following Saturday I set up a terrarium in one of our spare 10 gallon tanks with aquarium gravel across the bottom, with a layer of potting soil covered by terrarium moss over about two-thirds of the tank. There is a water dish with a potted plant in there as well as several moist chunks of spongy, decaying wood. It seems to like hiding inside one of the hollow knotholes of one of the wood chunks.
My concern is this. It was full and fat when I found it, two days later while still in the bottle, it excreted a large stool and has been skinny ever since. I bought a dozen baby crickets, yet many seemed too big for it to eat. This little eft is only about two and a half inches long. I have also been dropping gnat-sized flies and unidentified aphid-like insects in there when I catch them. There are no live bugs in there now. Is there any way to know that it is eating?
Some good news... it didn't look as skinny when I peeped in on it this morning. I hope it wasn't just my imagination.
More good news... I raise night crawlers in a cooler in the garage. They have reproduced in there and I'm hoping there are some inch-long babies in there that I can try dropping in the tank. Silly me... I didn't think they liked worms! I read elsewhere on the links that they will eat cut up worms as well. Not meaning to answer my own question here, is there any to discreetly feed a potentially spooked Newt?
Any advice/tips will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Eric