Our leopard gecko adventure: how it started
A few weeks ago I was in a pet store with my 10 year old daughter to get some supplies for our dog and cat. My daughter is an animal lover and wanted to look at the animals for sale. After looking at all kinds of rodents and fish and reptiles she said she would like a pet gecko. She thought the leopard gecko babies were so cute. I thought that a gecko might be better than a guinea pig and I suggested we get a book on leopard geckos to learn more. She reminded me that I had once bought her a book on goldfish, but never actually got the gold fish and she suspected that this was another trick.
We bought the leopard gecko book and read the brief information that it had. It really was not a great book, but it explained enough that we felt we could care for a gecko. I remembered my sister had a gecko at Thanksgiving last year and called to see if they still had it and did she think it was a good pet. She was very enthusiastic and said Striker was doing great. Her children enjoyed looking after it etc.
Well about a week later we went back to see what the pet store had for gecko habitats. Olivia saw a Zilla® Deluxe Desert Gecko set up with a 20 gallon critter terrarium. It was a little more than I wanted to spend, but it did come with a screen cover, 2 lights + bulbs for day and night, a nice looking hide, 2 small dishes (for food and water), a desert brown terrarium liner (carpet), a thermometer/humidity gauge and a bottle of reptile mist. I decided that it might be the easiest way to go to get started.
We set up the habitat and checked that it maintained a good temperature. With the light on and the thermometer directly below it, it was about 85 degrees F. That seemed to be within the range that the book suggested. Although I did read about keeping one side of the enclosure at 90 degrees. All that was missing was a gecko…