My other kids and some work birds

[Alika]

Parrots are great, but I also love reptiles. This is Xander, my green iguana. He will be 3 years old in the next month or so.



If you don't know, iguanas are incredibly hard to take care of. We almost killed this little guy with bad care the first year we had him. It took a lot of TLC, vet trips, and $$$ to bring him back around, but today he's very healthy.

This is Dante, our Suriname Boa Constrictor. We're not sure how old he is, but we estimate at about 9-10 months. He's about 32" long right now and will be 8ft+ when he is fully grown.



We recently moved our flamingos (at work) into a new exhibit. To do this, we had to carry them by hand across the aviary, hold them for the vet checkup, then release them into their new exhibit. I was very lucky to be able to help out with that.



This is my husband at the aviary where I work with our American Kestrel. This is a part of the show in which a volunteer gets to have a bird land on them. They don't know what kind of bird it will be, so we gear them up with goggles and a kevlar glove to scare them a little prior to it landing.



And this is Nzambi. She is a Columbian Boa Constrictor that my husband and I rescued. The girl who had her was an old co-worker of mine who's husband brought the snake over and just left her. This co-worker was scared to death of her and let her live on the floor in her closet with no heat. She tried to sell her at first, and when that didn't work I offered to take her.

She was in bad condition. She had severe stomatitis (mouth rot), a respiratory infection, and was both emaciated (it hurt to eat, so she didn't) and dehydrated. She also had numerous infected rat bites from being fed live prey. We rushed her to the vet the day we got her and spent nearly $400 to get her better, but she died four or five days later. R.I.P., Nzambi.