FINALLY got my very first cham!!!

[djfishygillz]

One more thing, if you started a new thread in the free range section of the enclosure and setup thread you may get more feedback there because people are expecting to criticize and see free ranges. Here they are expecting to just see photos, and unless they look into every page on this thread they may get lose and not comment on the free range like you want.

 

[Jupiter]

Thats a good idea, I don't know how carefully you've read through this thread but I joke in the captions a fair amount about how disproportionate the detail of my updates is compared to how much people are interested.

One other word of advise, chameleons that are always caged are more docile and calm in their cages. But once they are free ranged they can start to nose-rub on their because they will become used to not having barriers to where they would prefer to travel. So watch for the nose-rub and the seemingly restless attempts to escape their cage once they have to go back into it. If he is attempting to always get out you may have to make the decision to ALWAYS free range which is a very large commitment.

Also I forgot to say, it looks very cool! I love the dense vegetation.

Thanks for the compliment, I really like the way it's changed the feel of my room. That is very good to know, I am actually having some trouble coaxing him back in from where he spent the night, which I was expecting because I know they would rather be out then in, but he needs to go back, if only to get his UVB and be humid. Do you have any advice on what a good time balance would be that would give him some fun freerange time but still have enough cage time to keep him tame?

 

[Camoflauge]

What kind of chameleon is that? He is beautiful, congrats!

 

[Jupiter]

Thank you he a panther, sired by Kandiroo from Chameleon Paradise.

 

[Jupiter]

Sup Cham Forums, hope you are all doing well! Things are going pretty good for me and Aesop, he's been digging his new freerange, and its really bringing out some new colors! Starting to see a full rainbow...



He's also getting stripy all over, and his throat is getting bluer...





Washing his little eyes out



You can really see his candycane stripes in this one



Sooo...I'm not a chemeleon, nor have I ever been, so I guess it's not really my place to judge...but I feel like surely there's a better way he could be doing this...



Hello, my name is Aesop, and I am absorbing heat.



Clambering on his net. He went up here (pretty much the tallest point on the range) and spent a few hours checking things out. He hasn't been ranging since, so we'll see, but I wouldn't be surprised if that survey made him a lot more confidant.





Then we move on to the lastest chapters in my ongoing saga of botched feeding pics...









The one that was actually in focus was too late, naturally.

 

[Jupiter]

And then just so we don't end things on a string of failures, here's a nice pic of some of the new color schemes he's been showing recently.



That's all for now, but my sense of pattern recognition is hinting that there will be more. Happy fathers day to all you daddies out there (be you cham daddies or real daddies), and as always, thanks for reading!

EDIT: I don't know why those outdoor ones are so saturated, they were much more subtle before they went to photobucket. I doubt anyone cares, but I don't want anyone thinking that thats my idea of a properly balanced image haha

 

[Jupiter]

Hello everyone, I haven’t been able to post lately as my stuffy nose turned into a full-blown summer cold and put me down for the count. Lots of things have been happening though!

First off is a neat picture I got of my buddy Otis. Note the sweet facial hair.



Starting to get preeety colorful. This was on Monday, so it’s really just a teaser for what he was going to do the next day…



Being a little weirdo





Ok, so on Tuesday I made the trek down through Denver to Aurora to take him in for a checkup with the SUPER awesome Dr. Dayna Willems, aka our very own ferritinmyshoes!! I learned quite a bit from her, not just from the questions I asked but even just seeing the way she handled and interacted with him. Things are basically gravy with the exception of me still needing to find a way to bring his basking temp down some, without everywhere else getting too chilly. I felt SO bad packing him up in the box for the trip, he was clearly hating it, and my car has pretty hard suspension and was bouncing around and I could hear him scratching at the sides the whole time, when he was supposed to be asleep. Poor guy .



BUT when I opened the box he looked like this!!! Must have really been freaked out…



He stayed looking like that for most of the exam. Talk about stepping it up!



Anyway, when I got back home I put him on his plant outside and sprayed him and fed him and generally tried to make up for the traumatic three hours I had just put him through.



He looks like he’s wearing a little crown haha



Diamond-studded.



He also had these two little pale blue spots on him that were definitely not there before going to the vet…



Then I hung out with a friend for the rest of the day, and while I was sleeping in the next morning he shed! Talk about an eventful 24 hours! This is the only halfway decent pic I got of him post-shed; I haven’t felt like doing much of anything except blow my nose lately.



It’s crazy how noticeably bigger they are right after a shed! He has probably doubled in size since I got him and the shape of his head is much longer. He is about six inches from nose to vent now, and since I need to so some tinkering with his basking spot anyway, I think it might be about time to upgrade him to his big boy cage…

Thanks for looking!

 

[Jupiter]

So I haven’t really been taking many pictures in recent days, but that’s because he honestly hasn’t been very photogenic. I think the vet visit (or more specifically the trip to and from) really freaked him out, and he has spent the past week sulking and staying mostly in the back of the cage, refusing to come out with me or on his own. He continued to hand feed though, so I wasn’t too worried.





So in the meantime let’s check out Otis, who seems to have gotten himself tangled up in a pair of interdimensional portals.



So, flash forward to today and Aesop is finally starting to loosen up again, and eventually made his own way over to the freerange.



As he did, he also started to show some of those post shed colors I’ve been waiting to see.







Fortunately for me, that was all just warm up for this.



A better view of his purple (!?) armpit.



Moved further down the rope and into the sun some.



Some dramatic lighting

 

[Jupiter]

Eventually he settled down as he moved up into the leaves.













I also noticed that as I had been taking pictures of him, he would recoil slightly as I would go back and look through the shots I had just taken, and eventually I noticed that it was because he was glimpsing the screen. I showed it to him directly for just a second and he immediately flattened up and rotated around his branch 90 degrees to hide behind it! Somewhere in this thread there is a screenshot of the UI of the photo app that I use, and the image capture botton is huge and bright orange, so I guess that's what freaked him out? Either way I'm not letting him see it again that's for sure. Weird. I let him hang out on his range for pretty much the rest of the day, then when it looked like he was starting to hunker down for the night, transferred him back to his cage.



We’ve been together just shy of two months and I cannot BELIEVE how much he has grown!





Crazy!!! Anyway, I should be able to get more pictures now that he is apparently coming out of his funk, so stay tuned and thanks for looking!

 

[A1forall]

LOL He Looks Great!!Congrats

 

[Thegreatfonz]

Aesop's lookin good! His color scheme right now is awesome, at first I started thinking him and Ren may have different mothers but once Aesop's blue bars shine through I think they'll show some similar brotherly characteristics . Are you sure he wasnt catching glimpses of himself as you looked through the pics and reacted to that? I was gonna download that app today to see if my pictures will come out better.

 

[Jupiter]

Thanks A1

Thanks fonz, it will be interesting to see for sure. Bruce said he might be able to tell who the dam was when his colors come in some more. Yeah I'm sure, because it wasn't the pictures of himself he was seeing, it was the image capture screen, which doesn't have anything too exciting except that big orange button. Whatever it was, he did NOT like it. Let me know what you think of it, I found reading the manuel cover to cover helped quite a bit.

 

[Jupiter]

Hey everybody, don’t really have much to say, things have just been chugging along, so I’ll let the pics do most of the talking!







Showing some interesting lavender while munching on a cricket



Some outdoor macros













Snoozing. Notice his little grabber sticking up in the back there



I’ve learned enough about his light tolerances now that I can turn the light on for a minute without waking him up. Chameleons look so wise when they are asleep.

 

[Jupiter]

Cham on the go!





Starting to see some intense red/oranges in his neck









lol chams…







I don’t know why but I find this pic hilarious. He’s just like “uhmmmmm….”



That’s all for this update, all you fellow ‘mericans out there have a good fourth, and as always thanks for looking!

 

[katgraver]

brothers...

I can so tell my Sir George is his littlr brother! How old is Aesop? Curioys what alk you are feeding him as well.. George gets boredvwith just cruckets and silkies... great pictures!

 

[luud88]

any updated pictures?

 

[DLG]

How old is he?