Pi Reptiles

It's been a busy season for Pi, had some highs and lows when we hatched a worlds first, and then lost a whole clutch before it hatched, but few things have been as odd as the Tale of Chicken Little.

One of the pairings we had was our Caramel girl having a first time fling with our Bumble bee. In due course, she was shown to be gravid, so we weren't too surprised when we went in one morning and found her in the classic " how clever am I, I'm sitting on eggs" pose. What was unexpected was to find her sitting on a clutch of slugs! We did the usual washing off, de-scenting the box etcetera, and had a look at the slugs.

Well, one of them was not quite like the others, it was white, and looked like a viable egg...... except that it was absolutely tiny! exactly the size and shape of a hens egg.

Without a great deal of hope, we candled it...

and it was fertile!

Unable to consign this tiny life to the bin, we gave it a chance, incubating it as we have all the others, checking it every day, not expecting it to survive, but crossing fingers anyway. About day 30 it started to go mouldy, but was still viable so we powdered it with anti-fungal powder and sat back to wait.

Day 53, and it was collapsed, but still showing veins, so we carefully put a tiny tiny slit into it to check that the baby was alive. To our surprise, not only had the tiny little chicken egg beaten the odds and survived to full term, it had produced the top combo possible, and we had us a Bumble bee het caramel in the egg.

Day 55 , and Chicken Little was born, weighing 19 gms in the egg, and 17 out of it. The smallest baby royal I've ever seen, perfectly formed in miniature. I hope now we can get our little survivor to eat and grow, and we'll keep you posted on progress.

-Jackie