Hi guys.  Welcome back to Animal Wonders.  Today is going to be an unscripted show and we're just gonna go enjoy some of the animals.

(Intro)

This is Argos, he is a (?~0:22) lizard, a (?~0:23) lizard, and we got him when he was an adult and he had not been handled very much so being handled is not one of his favorite things, but he tolerates it fairly well.  It's really good to get him stimulation, so you know, sitting in an enclosure with not much going on all day isn't great for any animal so even though he's not super social and doesn't love our attention, the stimulation is still really good for him, and he gets really upset, he will poof out his belly and he will take his huge tail and whack it back and forth.  Right now he's not doing that, which is nice, because his tail is pretty hefty and it hurts if you get hit by it.  

I like hanging out with him just enough that he still enjoys it, but once he starts doing things like he's hissing at me right now, and he started hitting his tail back and forth like that, I don't want to stress him out, so we're gonna go ahead and put him back.  Bye, bud.  Let's go see someone else.

I'm gonna give some grass that I got from outside to the guinea pigs.  They're pretty excited.  Hi guys.  Here you go.  We can use grass from our yard because we live out of city limits and we do not spray our lawn so we know that this is all very safe, non-treated grass.  Here, you can have your own.  Good job, guys.  You're gonna steal it?  You guys.  I don't know what to say about that, they're just too cute.  Sometimes just watching animals be themselves is the best.  

One of my favorite things about the guinea pigs is that they are in pretty much a natural social group.  They have one male and two females and then several babies and it's wonderful to see them thrive and interact and just do what they would normally do.  Alright, I'm gonna let these guys continue enjoying the grass and dandelions.  Let's go check out another animal.

We've been hanging out with some of the animals that aren't really featured much on the channel and so I wanted to keep with that trend.  We have a white tree frog or Australian tree frog named Stumpy.  Let's get him on out here.  He has a pretty neat enclosure.  It has running water and branches and leaves and moss and lots of fun stuff for him but uh, getting him out is still really good for him.  He's a jumper, though, which is why I keep him kind of close to the enclosure.  If he wants to jump, I want him to land somewhere safe.

He has these really neat feet where he has sticky pads on them and so even if he jumped on the glass, he would actually stick to it.  Right now, he's pretty brown and that's pretty typical because he's not in direct sunlight.  If he got into direct sunlight and he warmed up, he would turn a bright green, which would help him blend into the leaves, but right now, he's kinda in the shade so being brown would be the best thing for him.  We're gonna let him go on back to sleep because these guys are actually nocturnal, but it's good to get him out and stimulated, just doing stuff so he doesn't get so bored.  Alright, let's go check out another animal.

Look, we're gonna go outside.  Joy likes to see where we're going before we do it so she doesn't get so nervous, so now she knows we're going outside.  Let's do this, huh?  Yeah.  Alright, we made it to our destination.  This is Joy's outside enclosure, so when it's sunny enough, she can come out here and hang out.  Right now, we're going to get some little grooming session in.  Joy is going through a molt right now and she's pretty itchy.  She's over-groomed her legs a little bit because she was so itchy on them, so we've been working on keeping her really misted, keeping the humidity level up, giving her lots of enrichment.

One of the ways that we give her enrichment is to hang out with her outside.  She's had many homes before she finally landed at Animal Wonders.  We've heard some stories, some pretty terrible stories of what happened to her beforehand, so she's dealing with lots of trauma in her past.  We just try and do our best to give her as much of a stable environment with also enough stimulation and enrichment that she doesn't get bored, but her mental well-being is probably one of the most difficult challenges that we have at Animal Wonders since she is just so intelligent and she's such a social bird.  Yeah.  Social species, that giving her tons and tons of attention is critical for her mental and physical well-being.

We're gonna go in to your little enclosure here.  Here you go.  Yeah.  You go on down there.  Keeping her in here is really beneficial for her and for me, so she gets some natural sunshine, she gets all the stimulation from being outside and then I get to hang  out in the garden and do what I need to do for the rest of the animals, huh?  Alright.  I'm gonna go ahead and get to my garden duties.  

I hope you enjoyed hanging out with animals today and just enjoying them with me.  If you'd like to go on an adventure with us every week, subscribe to our YouTube channel AnimalWondersMontana.  Thanks, and we'll see you next week.

(Endscreen/Credits)