Meet Falafel! Also known as The Waffle, That Handsome Lizard, and sometimes just, “Hey You!” or “Hey! Stop that!”. Falafel is a quince monitor, also known as the yellow tree monitor. We purchased him from a local pet shop in February of 2017, where we estimated he was about three to four months old.
Tiny Waffle
Baby Falafel was adorable, skittish and wary of people. You had to get a really good grip on him when he was not in a cage. He would sit slack in your hand until he thought your grip was loose enough to make a quick getaway, and then he would make a break for it. I was terrified of bringing him home because I thought a good sharp look might snap him in half, or otherwise we might lose him under a piece of furniture or something. We took a lot of guidance in getting started from Arcticrobot and his website at varanusmelinus.com.
We brought Falafel home in a little plastic container and started him out in a 20gal long glass reptile enclosure. We gave him a few inches of substrate to bury in, trying to find a balance between him being secure and us not losing him in it. We started him out on a variety of bugs.
Slowly, Falafel started to get more accustomed to our presence. We tried to get him used to our hands being nearby, and started doing short handling sessions. As soon as he was able, he loved being out and exploring the house (this started out as the end of one room). We would let him sit on the windowsill and he clambered all over the blinds.
Our waffle grew quickly and loved climbing, so it wasn’t long before we moved him to a larger Exo Terra enclosure, 36x18x36 and made him a stand out of PVC that we wrapped with rope. It is important to note that we learned not to leave the PVC feet open at the bottom, because one day we thought he’d “escaped” and really he had just learned to climb all over the inside of his 2” PVC.
From there, we went to a tall Cages By Design enclosure, modified to have PVC for its walls. However, this proved to be too tall to manage Falafel's humidity correctly, and the height caused other problems for us as well. Eventually we moved him to a large wooden enclosure we built ourselves, 7.5'x3'x4' (wxdxh) and installed a pond with moving water. We're waiting to see whether he ultimately outgrows it and needs a new enclosure (and whether we need a new wall!).
Bugs and Meats
I must admit that Falafel outgrew his love of bugs a lot sooner than I hoped he would. I have a very vivid memory of offering him this giant juicy cricket, and it bounced over to him, and he looked at it in an interested way, and it…walked about an inch out of his reach and he couldn’t be bothered with it anymore. We were also offering him meat, and he took to that readily and soon dispensed with the bugs.
Offering Falafel meat ended up being a pretty cool way to bond with him. We would get a plastic fork and offer him a bit of meat on the end, and he would come up to us and grab the meat. Most of the time he would just sit nearby and finish the meal, so he was better positioned to take more. When we had rodents, we offered them off tongs and so had the opportunity to engage in this same positive interaction.
When Falafel grew bigger and hormones started kicking in, he would be a little more aggressive with grabbing meat off the fork and we had to stop using a fork because we were worried he’d hurt himself. Instead, we started target training him to come when he hears the sound of a fork butt being tapped on the floor. When he came over, he would be rewarded with a plate of food. This has also been effective in redirecting him when he wants to explore other parts of the house. (It doesn’t work forever if there is no food!)
One of the coolest things about this is that he seems to differentiate between different sounds—a finger tapping on the same floor might not bring him over. On the other hand, I’ve seen him run over when I am banging out a bowl over a trash can.
Showers and Hormones
Another thing we’ve done throughout our time with Falafel is showers and soaks. Since the humidity in his bigger 4’x3’x6’ enclosure was always a struggle to maintain with a high basking temperature and extra height, we have supplemented with humidifiers, soaks in a tub, and showers. When our waffle was a baby, he would sit on the shelf in our walk-in shower and stretch out under the shower head. When he grew older however, and started showing signs of puberty, this was also a condition that seemed to elicit hormonal biting, so we stopped standing at the shower and interacting with him while it was running. (Tub soaks continued to be fine). However, since Falafel gets into everything, if he goes over to the walk in shower and—well, walks in—I will turn it on for him and he’ll just sit in the bottom of it as long as he wants. This has been a pretty peaceful compromise. Sometimes he’ll come out of his enclosure for some time out and go straight back to that bathroom, and I wonder if he remembers each time that there’s a shower in there.
Once Falafel figured out how to get up onto the countertop and discovered the sink, he started climbing into it on a regular basis. He will climb in and we'll turn the water on for him, and he can sit and soak, and interfere with us doing the dishes.
Falafel’s hormones have been a bit of a challenge for us, but he’s never been the biting, crazed maniac I feared when we first decided to get a monitor lizard. When Falafel was about a year old he started out by strutting around and wiping his butt on things. He would arch his back around a table leg, or a box, or pretty much anything. Sometimes he would evert his hemipenes (that’s how we found out he was a male!) while doing this. I think it was also around this time that he would express his displeasure with something by sitting up and lashing his tail slowly back and forth. He has done this to new objects, the dog, the dog when she had to wear a cone, and various other things. Generally we were able to scoop him up and remove him from the thing, and he would be fine. When he was in his enclosure and did this, he’d stop once the offending thing moved away.
Always, though, when he is afraid, Falafel would rather run (FAST) than bite. Bites we’ve gotten have been accidental grabs for food and hormone-related bites, and in watching for hormone signs and using tongs and plates, we’ve been able to largely avoid these. He has a great personality and his desire to explore things makes him confident and outgoing.
Exploring Waffle
Falafel’s desire to explore things also makes him rather like a raccoon. We try and get him some time out of his enclosure every day. As he’s grown, Falafel has explored more and more, and he has learned to climb our grocery cart, cabinetry, kitchen trash can, and a variety of things we never thought he’d be able to reach. If we ever thought “he’ll never get up there” about something, fast forward a few months and he’d find a way to get up there.
Right now, one of Falafel's favorite things is trash cans. He can climb into and knock over the smaller bathroom cans, and he usually gets the time between me hearing the THUNK to me fishing him out to find out whatever interesting things are in there. He has been a good motivator in us regularly emptying trash cans.
I’m really pleased with the amount of growth and bonding we’ve had with Falafel over the last few years. When we can, we like to take him out on his harness and work with him outside. We’ve done this a few times but eventually the weather is too hot or too cold and we have to start over the next year. When he was younger, Falafel quickly outgrew his harness and we had to wait to buy another one. In time, we’d like to get him comfortable enough to practice recall on a harness outside as well. I would never, never let him outside without a harness, but if he ever did get out I’d like a shot at having him back that doesn’t require me to run faster than he does.
