I just got my 2 month old beardie last week and he’s settling in quite well and eating plenty. However I’m having some trouble feeding him. Could anyone advise please?
I’m currently feeding brown crickets roughly 5 - 10 mm as the dubias available where I live are a bit too big for him.
At the moment I’m painstakingly catching each tiny cricket with tweezers and feeding him around 35 of these throughout the day (he’s currently fed 3 times a day). As you can imagine it’s quite difficult as they hop around when I’m trying to catch them.
All of my research prior to buying him suggested putting them in a bowl or feeding him in a box outside of his viv, however I’ve found that they hop out of the bowl and hide in his viv (even if I refrigerate them first, they warm up before he catches them). He’s quite skittish and while I’m working every day on befriending him, I can’t currently pick him up to put him in a feeding box without causing some stress.
How do the rest of you feed your beardies crickets? Am I doing something wrong or is it really just a case of catching each one until he’s big enough for dubias or trusts me enough to be picked up?
I take the stuff out of the tank, so there is nothing inside for them to hide under! Then Sonny chases them all over the place, he loves it! They usually crawl out after a while anyway and they gobble them up!
Tip the crickets into a 35L plastic archive box, suck up the number of crickets you want per feed, dump the sucked up crickets into a 100 ml round plastic tub or a small clean dry jam bottle , where the calcium powder is , lid on , shakey , shakey ==> dusty crickets , drop 3 - 4 crickets at a time into little beardie's tank, let him catch and gobble them down, add a few more, repeat til he looses interest (too full to eat more).
Makes very fast work of catching the crickets and sorting larger bulk batches, and it's a great gadget to have to catch those inevitable rogue crickets who jumped out the little tub too fast for you.