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Hello everyone, it's Kyle Russell from Wilbur's Wildlife and I'm here with our next video in our new video series with our little friend Junior the bearded dragon
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Junior is a three-year-old central bearded dragon who's lived at Wilbur's Wildlife her whole life
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She is a very chilled out little lizard as you can see. Some of you may have met Junior at our event
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She always sits on her little rock here and just hangs out, which is a really normal behaviour for bearded dragons because these guys are
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reptiles. Now the easiest way to tell that is because they have scales. But the other thing that
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makes reptiles different is that they are what most of you would know as a cold-blooded animal
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but we know as an ectothermic animal. And ectotherms are just animals that can't generate their
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own internal body heat through their general body processes like, say, a human can or birds
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or other mammals. These guys have to sit in the sun and generate heat from the sun absorbing through
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their skin. And so junior in the morning, like it is at the moment while we're filming
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this would be out on a rock or she be up on a log where you see them all the time on top of fence posts Sitting there she flattens her back out like a big pancake makes as much surface area as she can so that as much of the sun can go in
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so she can warm up as she can. Because in the morning when they get up, they're not quite as fast as they're going to be
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They're a little bit slow and sluggish until that sun sort of hit them, and they're starting to warm up
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Now, Junior, as I said, is a beautiful central beard of dragon. These guys are found across New South Wales, Queensland
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South Australia, the Northern Territory and Victoria. So they've got a pretty wide range across a lot of Australia
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And they live in lots of areas of scrub and desert and grasslands
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where you're going to have nice sandy sort of soils. And so this beautiful yellow colouration on her helps her to blend in and avoid predators
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It's going to be able to trick them a little bit, they might be able to see her as easily. So that's why these guys are a nice pretty yellow
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Okay, to some of the other beard of dragon, do you see such as this in beaed dragon or a bit of a darker brown I live in areas with a bit of a darker soil colour
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So Junior here, also to avoid predators, has some pretty cool tricks
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because she doesn't have big teeth in her mouth, she doesn have big claws to try and scratch things up with she doesn want to get into a fight she wants to scare things away or she wants to hide from them And so if they coming towards her something that a predator that might want to try and eat her what she going to do is take her little beard under the chin here
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that the name comes from. Unfortunately, the name doesn't come from them breathing fire and flying around
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like the dragons and how to train your dragon. But the beard part is true. That little beard under the chin here
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That puffs up to the same size as her head almost. So her head can pretty much double in size really quickly
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and it also turns from this nice white colour that she's got at the moment to a bit of a darker black colour
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And so she looks really big, really scary like it's going to be hard to eat her
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or that she's going to put up a bit of a fight if you did try to. And so what she's hoping for is that's going to scare the predators away
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If they don't, she's hoping she'll take a bit of a closer look at all these spikes she's got
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And what those are useful for is because a lot of animals that eat be it of dragons
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don't chew their food. They're a little bit messy. These guys, instead, they're going to eat their food whole
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Things like snakes are going to be doing that. And so all these spikes down the side here of Junior
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those are going to hurt your throat as they go now. She not going to be very great to eat So she hoping that will lead to them leaving her alone as well For us these are nice and soft and bendy If you ever felt Junior at one of our shows you know that she absolutely lovely to touch and loves a little scratch on her back
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So she's a very lovely little lizard. These guys, being a girl
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one day, Junior might get the chance to have some little babies. Being a beard of dragon, she's going to lay eggs
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and she might have between 11 and 30 eggs in her clutch, and in some cases they can lay up to nine clutches in a year
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so nine different sets of eggs. So it's going to be a lot of babies. out of just one beard of dragon
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And they're going to take between about 60 and 80 days to hatch
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And breeding for these guys occurs between about September and March. Just coming to the end of breeding season as we're filming this video
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So Junie has made a lovely little model here this morning for our first video
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Hope you've enjoyed tuning in here at Wilbur's Wildlife. We'll be bringing you lots more of these videos in the future
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So don't forget to like this video if you've enjoyed and subscribe to our channel. Let us know what other animals you'd love to see in your
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our next video thank you very much
