Reptile shows in the Melbourne Summer

Reptile shows Melbourne in Summer
January is a strange time of year.
In theory it’s quiet, but some years we are flat out at Snakebusters.
In the last few years, I’ve made a point of NOT chasing work in early January so that we can get a chance to catch up on all the jobs that should have been done over the year and weren’t.
This summer, 2011-2012 was no different and so early January was very light-on for reptile show bookings in Melbourne. We didn’t chase school holiday programs, kids parties or anything else over the period and were too busy in December to follow-up our regular caravan park bookings and the like.
This in theory means many days on end at the home base, cleaning cages, feeding reptiles, re-arranging things and so on.
In practice this is not the case.
After a very busy run in December, the tail end of the month was spent, feeding, cleaning and then upgrading cages for many reptiles.
Then the breeding started to happen. Or perhaps more correctly the consequences of it.
Two gravid Brown snakes were due and one laid eggs around Christmas time with another due to lay in mid to late January. Both have bred previous years so to that extent it is nothing new for us.
Snakebusters are the only people in the world who breed Eastern Brown Snakes and our’s don’t stop laying eggs, year after year. They never double clutch in a season though.
We use on old fridge as an incubator and it works magnificently!
Also knocked up (that means pregnant or “gravid”) are a two four-year old Red-bellied Black Snakes and possibly a Blue Bellied Black Jaffa.
Also we have outside chances on an old Copperhead and a Tiger Snake, and then there’s at least one eastern Bluetongue gravid to the max.
All the gravid reptiles need to be care for differently as in high humidity cages so that any young born do not dehydrate before I get to them.
This happened with the first lot of brown snake eggs, which sat in the cage for days before I found them.
All were OK to be shifted to the incubator, except for one egg that may have been questionable from the word “go” or more likely ruined due it’s laying position.
We called that “egg 13” while eggs 1-12 were all apparantly perfect.
However another side of my job is catching rougue snakes that turn up in people’s houses and it turned out that December and January were flat out. Yes I had call outs to catch snakes on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and Christmas eve.
Lots of the usual kinds of snakes as in Browns, Tiger and Copperheads.
Now of course, nature abhors a vacum, so if I am not chasing work at School holiday programs and the like, there are plenty of others in Melbourne and Victoria willing and able to offer reptile shows.
These other companies carpet bomb potential clients with fliers and phone calls and often swindle our existing clients to try with these other outfits.
Some of clients refuse to switch firms, but others do.
In fairness to them, if they get a call from someone else offering more than Snakebusters for half the price, why shouldn’t they take a punt with these people.
And yes, as January marches on and yes we are doing reptile shows in this period as well, some of our clients are ringing us to tell us about what they have seen in these alternative Melbourne reptile shows.
Our hands-on shows are demonised by all our competitors. These companies go hard on the fear factor and try to convince kids that even harmless reptiles are to be avoided at all costs.
Many of these other players in the “reptile education” space won’t even let kids touch reptiles, while a few of the better ones allow kids a fleeting “pat” of a reptile’s tail.
Snakebusters of course are the only hands-on reptile company that lets people hold the reptiles and so we are quite different to all the other Victorian reptile shows.
Now while we can’t say that everyone prefers our approacvh to reptile information and reptile education during incursions, I can confidently say that more people do prefer the hands-on shows to the hands off alternatives.
Of course after being bitten by inferior imitators, it’s not a surprise that a lot of our clients ring us wanting us back in the next school holiday period to give their kids a proper reptile show in Melbourne to give the kids Australia’s best reptiles education.