So is it Twenty-Ten or is it Two Thousand Ten? Guess I have a year to figure this out.Thank you for hanging in there this past week. You’ve read through many posts summarizing the happenings at the Kern home in 2009. This post will give you some insight to my plans in 2010 with the animals, facility, and internet presence. While this could go on and on, I will try to keep this under 50.000 words…. Or so.
Animals
To reiterate from the prior post, we are very proud of the colors of the crested and gargoyle geckos born in ’09 but really struggled producing enough to grow out to adults or to fulfill our wish lists. Our main issue related to selling our bearded dragons. How could this be linked you might ask? Well, we kept our dragons next to our cresteds and their extra heat warmed the entire room by at least 6-7 degrees! By selling the bearded dragons and taking out the 8 heat lights, our cresteds basically ‘cooled’ the entire year! The electric bill went down considerably but the number of crested/gargoyle babies went down by 2/3!!! Plans for 2010? As we are in the middle of winter (yes, still cooling) in Wisc. our Rhacodactylus are still cooling down. Once we start warming up naturally, our plan is to warm up the room with a small space heater.
We held back some high harley, Reds, Mocha’s babies, Pinstriptes, and some amazing red Harleys. As well, we held back our better gargoyles and the 4 R. chahouas from last spring.
We are planning to breeding 4 types of day geckos this upcoming year- P. standingi, P grandis, P. laticauda, and P. klemmeri.. We really enjoy working with these beautiful animals and will be holding back several, and offering some on the Store and at Reptile Shows.
Leopard Geckos- with many beautiful, different morphs bred here last year, we are most excited about mixing and matching in 2010. One aspect we will focus on will be the Raptor morph. This will be introduced to many other morphs and hopefully will produce a number of new variations (at least new to us), including Radars, Diablo Blancos, dreamsicles, and others. As usual, we will concentrate on our carrot tails as these are still one of our favorite leopard colors to work with.
Pictus- In 2009, we bred a number of P. pictus and held several back. We also purchased a line from a close friend that is an outstanding red variant! Photos will be coming in early 2010 so stay tuned!
Australians- We are working with a handful of these cute, small animals. They include knobtails, velvets, Diplos, and Strophurus. As everything was cooled this winter, our fingers are crossed that we can bred enough to offer some to our friends. However, we will probably hold several back to add to our collection.
Facility
Where in the world will I go with all the new animal that are expected to be hatched in the new year? I don’t know! I usually plan this out so well but, here I sit.... :)
If all the kids don’t move out of the house, I’m going to have to start looking around for some rental property!
Supplies
No real plans here. We like to consider ourselves the one stop shop for your gecko needs so, if you need something, let us know!
Reptile Shows
About once a month, I’m asked if we do the Texas, or California, or New York, or some other show. I wish we could get around more to these great shows but we just have no time. I’m hoping that through the year we will be able to expand out a bit and do other shows in the Midwest. Of course, if someone would like to sponsor a business to fly out to one of the coasts to do a show, I know just hte person that would be excited to come out.
Blog / Web Site / YouTube / Email / Forums
In reverse- one area I feel I neglected this past year was in participating in forum conversations. I will change this in 2010 as this is such a pleasure in my gecko keeping experience and I enjoy sharing what I can to hopefully help others in the hobby.
Our Emails will be more frequent as the goal will always be to share information- such as upcoming shows or a short note on something like hatching out a chahouas (like our November Email). If the Emails come too frequently or you do not want to see them, please click the link at the bottom… or better yet, let me know what I can change!
YouTube One thing we will continue to do is educate. Whether it is learn from our success or even sometimes learn from our struggles (like the crested gecko issue in '09), we enjoy sharing with other hobbyists as others have shared so much with us. SEND US YOUR SUGGESTIONS!
Finally Web Site- I will not go into this too much on this as I don’t want this to sound like I'm promoting our store but we have BIG plans for the site in 2010. This seems like a never ending quest for me but my goal is to provide more, and easier access to the information.
Blog- See above comment about our Store page. We will be looking at a completely new format to make this easier for us to maintain and most importantly for you to access.
Stay tuned!
Facebook / Twitter /YouTube
As there is some much potential to meet new people, we will continue to support the Supreme Gecko and the Australian Geckos pages on Facebook as well as keeping up with our Wally Kern page.
Twitter is growing so very slowly for us as we have a difficult time keeping in touch 24/7 with the tool. We might spent some time getting more Tweet Knowledgeable this next year. If you have suggestions for us, we are all ears
In summary- we have many plans for 2010- When I say many plans, I want to emphasize that we will be breeding for color, breeding for new morphs, changing our web site, offering more videos to provide more to you, the hobbyist. Again, I can only do this through your suggestions and comments so please let me know what you want to see.
