Got the blue tongue out of his hide to check on him as I hadn't seen him since he shed, and I wanted to make sure he was OK and didn't have any stuck scales anywhere.

I wasn't sure if he'd be hungry as we're getting into the time of year where he might start brumating and go off his food for a couple of months, so rather than make up a dish of food for him I just offered him dog food still in the tray. It's fair to say he was indeed hungry!

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The scaly sausage has been hiding more or less continually for the last couple of weeks. I thought he might be going into brumation a touch early due to the cool nights we had before it was raining all the time, but it seems he was instead preparing to shed his skin. He finally emerged this evening and spent a while rubbing himself on things to get the old skin off and, as usual, eating most of it. There were a few scraps left though, like this bit from his tail.

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One of my more successful 3D printing projects: Jerry's platforms and ramps. The scaly sausage does seem to like them.

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The lizard dug a hole, and is now resting in his hollow log.

One of the big advantages of a "bioactive" reptile enclosure like Jerry's is that it does encourage natural behaviours. Having a soil-like substrate, a layer of leaf litter, and lots of isopods running around prompts Jerry to poke and scratch around in the leaves and dirt like a wild blue tongue would. This is good enrichment for his little lizard brain.

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Resting his chin on the rock where his food bowl gets put, looking for all the world like he's thinking "Why is there no food here? This is where my food normally appears. I definitely should be getting food right now. Can't you see I'm wasting away."

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More often than not this is the view I get of the scaly sausage: the end of his tail sticking out of his hollow log.

He absolutely loves that log, and spends a lot of his time just hanging out in there. I was very lucky to get it. Shortly after I bought Jerry a tree surgeon ended up with some natural hollow logs from their work, and decided to offer them up for sale on a local reptile Facebook Group. A rare opportunity, with perfect timing, and it turned out that the logs were an ideal size for Jerry's enclosure.

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Jerry the blue tongue is coming up on his 5th Gotcha Day.

This has triggered the annual Ordering of the Replacement UV-B Tube, and I've ordered some of his favourite foods and a spare basking lamp while I was at it. Meanwhile I've topped up the leaf litter layer in his enclosure, but I think I need to replace at least a couple of his plants too. The ferns down the cool end aren't quite dead yet, but they are not doing well.

Jerry himself has been antisocially hiding away for most of the past week, which I think was preparation for shedding his skin. He seems to be all done with that now, but is still just lurking in his beloved hollow log today.

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