The Journey of Bonding With a Baby Lizard

This is Thunderhead, a baby morning gecko no bigger than a paperclip. She hatched just a few weeks ago and I've been looking after her ever since. She's tiny, lightning fast and not the easiest animal to form a bond with. But it's not impossible. Morning geckos get more nervous as they get older, and if I don't build trust with her now, I might never get the chance. So here's the plan. Find out this adorable gecko's favourite food, help her feel calm around me and finally build her and her family the most insane home a gecko has ever seen. But before I show you how far we've come, we need to travel back 9 months. This is Wanton and she is pregnant with Thunderhead. A few months pass by and the eggs are laid and a few months after that, Thunderhead was born. But if I'm going to get this gecko to trust and feel calm around me, then I'm going to need to find her favourite food. Fruit is used as a treat for geckos and on the menu today is papaya, banana, mango and a peach. I made a puree of each fruit and lay them on the table. Thunderhead walks over and inspects the peach first, before sticking her tiny little foot directly in it. Next she wanders over to the mango. This would be my choice, but Thunderhead isn't on the same page. She trots over to the banana and seems intrigued, but not as intrigued as she is by the papaya. She wanders over and that tiny little tongue takes one tiny little taste of the sweet fruit. And we have a winner. Papaya is Thunderhead's favourite fruit, but this is just step one of a long ladder and you can clearly see how much Thunderhead trusts me at the moment. Every time I go near her, she turns and runs. But I am now equipped with the knowledge that she likes papaya and this may just turn out to be a valuable asset in my bid to bond with Thunderhead. But this is where the first problem comes in. When Thunderhead is with her sisters it's hard to tell them apart, which makes bonding tricky, so I've come up with a solution. Before the geckos get their final home upgrade, Thunderhead is getting her own temporary space, designed specifically to help her feel safe and calm and maybe start trusting me. So I'm being strategic about this. I've added tissue culture plants from Tropica to give her cover and comfort. I've glued a small bowl to the top of this branch and that's her feeding spot, and just above that bowl there's a UVB light where she can bask. The idea is simple. If she starts spending time here and I'm the one bringing her food, she'll start to associate me with something good, and slowly, maybe, she'll stop running every time I move. The day ends with Thunderhead eating gecko food from the bowl, before resting on a branch. But there is a second problem I haven't told you about just yet. If I do not build trust with Thunderhead now then it will never happen. As she gets older she's going to become more flighty and that makes handling her nearly impossible, which is why I'm starting when she's young. Over the past few weeks I've been feeding Thunderhead a mix of gecko food, papaya and fruit flies, but the real marker of whether she feels calmer around me is if she will eat from my finger. Every time I've tried this it has failed, but that was with gecko food, so what happens if I try with her favourite food? I slather my finger up in papaya and place it in front of the tiny gecko. She seems nervous and steps backwards, but the smell of the sweet fruit captures her attention and she throws out a little taste of the air, leans forward, and proceeds to eat the papaya directly from my finger. It's quite hard to convey how nice it is to have such a tiny creature eat from your finger, but to take this to the next level I want to see if she'll let me hold her. Rather than pick her up and force her to be held, she has to step onto my finger willingly. As she sits on my water bottle I outstretch my finger to her, and Thunderhead, surprisingly, climbs on. And not only did she climb on, she did something I was not expecting. It's nice to feed a tiny gecko from your finger, and it's also nice to hold one, but not so much when it's on your nose. We have made some great progress over the past few weeks and this shows because Thunderhead will now step onto my hand without any persuasion. Now our bond is clearly growing but if she's going to live a happy life she needs to bond with her own kind, but I wanted to do something different. This is my high-end drawing of what I have in my mind, and a very kind man in the USA called Rengold helped me bring it to life. Four weeks later the city was ready to be painted and my good friend the wizard's brush helped me do it. Are you happy? Yeah, see, everyone's happy. So I'll probably send you back now to your dimension, so bye. We have gone from a crappy drawing on a receipt to this. The small windows have spaces for the baby to hide in and the big windows have spaces for the adults. They can even lay their eggs in here. Simulating the sun is the best grow light I've ever used which is made by Mother. Head to my description if you'd like one and this would not be complete without the plants which I got from Tropica. But just before Thunderhead moves into her new home I realised something important. Thunderhead is named after Gileas Thunderhead from Golden Axe. No deep reason, I just like the name. She'll willingly step onto my hand, let me hold her, feed her and stay calm the whole time. But here's the problem. Once she enters this new world I won't be able to tell her apart from her roommates. She'll become part of the group again and the bond we've built will disappear. But here's the cool thing. Morning geckos are nearly all female and they can lay fertile eggs without ever meeting a male. It's all thanks to a wonder of nature called Parthenogenesis and this is helped along by a behaviour called pseudocopulation. This basically means they grow up against each other which encourages reproduction. Not essential but it does help things along. Because of this, Thunderhead is a genetic copy of her mother and when she grows up she'll create her own little clones meaning there will be three generations of geckos living in this terrarium. And with 54 rooms to choose from they'll have more than enough space to live comfortably for a very long time. The first adult goes in. She is the first generation under my care and immediately explores one of the rooms. Each room has a little bed of sphagnum moss inside making it warm, humid and perfect for shedding. The rest of the adults go in too. And then come the juveniles, the second generation. Not yet fully grown but bold, curious and very, very cute. And this moment, watching them explore a world that was just a thought I had in my head all those months ago, it's hard to explain just how satisfying that is. And Thunderhead. Ah, Thunderhead. I've grown attached to this little gecko over the past few months. She has one final meal, a fruit fly from my tweezers, hops onto my finger one very last time and jumps into her new home. But not without looking back just for a moment. And just like that, I'll never fully know which one she is again. But before I say goodbye to you, just as I was leaving the studio to go to bed, this little head popped up. I have no idea if it was Thunderhead, but let's pretend it was. If you enjoyed me and Thunderhead becoming friends, you'll definitely enjoy one of these.