I’m Holly Friedland, program director of the Midatlantic Reptile Show and this is how to care
for a bearded dragon. Next we’ll gonna show you how to set up the enclosure for your bearded
dragon. First, you’ll need a substraight material, which is, what’s on the bottom of the cage,
today we’re gonna use newspaper and you can use any kind of newspaper, we get this unprinted
newspaper but, any newspaper will actually work. Some people used sand or sandy soil for their
substraight and that works fine to, but if you just used sand, you should feed your animal in a
different enclosure so that they don’t swallow a lot of sand. And after you have the substraight
down, you wanna put your cage furniture in there, and first you need to put your heating pad, and
that goes underneath the tank, so that the animals stays warm. Also, we’re gonna have a heat
lamp and the lamp will give UV light, you can either use a fluorescent UV light or, this is a, an
incandescent UV light which also, they’re really great because they also gives off heat, and you
don’t have to buy two different lamps. And this lamp’s gonna sit, there’s a screen part of the
cage right here, and the lamp is gonna sit on that. And we’re attaching it to this lamp stand which
you can buy if there’s no way to secure the lamp on the top of the enclosure. If you have a flat
aquarium, it can just sit on top. And then you’re gonna need a hide box of some sort which
should actually be where the, where the heating pad is. And this gives the animal a place to hide.
You’ll also need, with bearded dragons, they need a basking area, and the basking area should be
underneath of where your light is. And with bearded dragons, they actually like to sit almost 90
degrees from the ground, so you wanna try to get a branch that is more at this angle than flat, and
they like to bask on that. You’ll also need a thermometer so you can see what the basking area,
the temperature is, and you want the temperature to be about 100-105 degrees. You’ll also need a
water bowl, and this cage is a little bit small but it’s for demonstration purposes. So you can see
everything you need, and the water bowl should be big enough that the bearded dragon can
actually get in it and lay in it. Then you’ll also want a food dish, now they eat a variety of food,
so, you’ll have the food dish for the vegetables and then the insects will just run around in there.
And that’s how you set up the enclosure, next, we’ll talk about how to choose the bearded
dragon that’s right for you.
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