Happy birthday Jayden!!
For Jayden's slave, I always like asking what your general husbandry practices have been for the majority of your dragons life. What does his daily diet look like along with his lighting setup?
I have an idea, but I always like to ask dragon owners who own a dragon over 10 years old for what their care looks like that afforded them such a long life
-Brandon
Jayden may have survived this long in spite of me, LOL, because I haven't been doing anything extraordinary.
He has a 55 gallon viv with a cork round for a basking spot. It lets him bask under the light bulb when he wants to. He has a 24 inch Reptisun 10.0
UVB bulb that goes across the top of his viv, and a large plastic hut with a beardie sized flannel blanket inside to lie on. I don't use one of those heater things, just a light bulb for supplemental heat, because I live in a warm climate (Arizona desert) and it just never gets that cold in the house. The substrate is paper towels, and I use a baby bathtub to give him his baths.
He gets fed salads usually every other day, simply because when I offer him a salad, it usually remains uneaten and in good shape for that long. If he eats the salad or it drys out, I replace it sooner. He rarely eats them anyway, unless he happens to accidentally grab some along with a bug. He gets super worms and crickets, and occasionally dubia. His salads usually get sprinkled with Herptivite, or sometimes calcium instead, but since the insects get calcium on them before I feed them to him, it's usually Herptivite.
I don't know much about how he was taken care of for the first three years of his life. The beardie rescue told me that some boys had been begging for a pet snake, but the mother would not have a snake in the house, so they bought a bearded dragon for them instead. They were not happy and never wanted him. They didn't even bother to name him, just called him "the lizard." After several years the boys still didn't want him, so they turned him in to the rescue and bought a snake.
I was active on this forum in 2014 when I adopted Jayden. I learned how to take care of my last beardie on this forum, and two members who were active here at the time, Sue and Esther, helped me find a medieval-sounding name for "the lizard." Now Jayden has one of those bicycle plates that says "Jayden" on his viv. I was kind of hoping they would see this post, but like most of the people who were here then, they seem to have moved on.
Jayden isn't much of a cricket chaser anymore, but he loves to eat them and takes them from my fingers. Guess the old guy just wants to be spoiled. He's always been a calm beardie. My last beardie was active and would find ways to get out of his viv. Jayden is just a mellow fellow, and has been the entire time he's been with me.
You'll probably find something I'm doing wrong here, but this is how it's been for the past nine years.
Edited to add: I went by the name PastelBeardie or Pastel Beardie then, and the name referred to the color of my first beardie, but for some reason the system wouldn't let me sign in. After a long fight, I came back as PastelBeardie2.
