Hello! Kevin here, publisher of Reptibian.com, a blog about Reptiles and Amphibians! I like the idea of blending different names together and so I was messing around with a few different variations of terms related to reptiles and amphibians. So when thinking about website names a few crossed my mind… “Amphitile” or “Rephibian”?? Then it hit me, how about using “Rept” (from Reptile) and “ibian” (from Amphibian) and viola Reptibian.com was born!
Growing up in Southern California, I always seemed to have one pet or another, some store bought or from the pound, and others caught out in the wild so to speak!
Let’s see… it all started when I was about 4 or 5 years old, my parents bought us a white hamster and we named him “White Lightning” (because he was so fast and white, yeah I know pretty obvious..). My sister and I would play all sorts of games with him and even dress him up for Halloween.
A couple years later we got our own dog, a Golden Retriever mix (mutt ;)) named Sigmund (Sig). I really loved that dog and would play in the yard with him for hours and chased him around the block a times when he dug his way out of our yard! Not too long after that, we got our very own cat, Barney. He was pretty mellow and got along okay with Sig, most of the time.
Fast forward a few years, I was about 9 or 10 and was spending my days from dusk til dawn with my friends, riding my Schwinn Scrambler through fields, marshes, drainage ditches, you name it, looking for lizards, snakes, tadpoles, frogs, etc.
My favorite critters, as you may have guessed, were the scaly, slimy kind of creatures known as amphibians and reptiles!
The go-to scaly friend was the common Western Fence Lizard which flourished in the fields and wetlands near my home. My buddies and I would scour the land, looking in pushes and turning over rocks to find the tiny, the huge and all the different shades of these cool lizards.
Then we graduated up to the more advanced Gopher Snakes, which proved to be a little more ornery and aggressive little to a couple mishaps, couple bites but nothing too serious. I would take them home in a sack and put them in an aquarium and feed them mice I bought from the store (much to my mom’s delight, I assure you…)
At some point I also had Gardener Snake which ate goldfish I put in a little bowl inside his tank. In later years, I owned a Fire Newt which I kept in a tank with tropical fish and also had a couple Green Anoles at one point which I fed lots of vitamin dusted crickets.
I’ve always been fascinated with all things related to Reptiles and Amphibians so I decided to start Reptibian.com to collect cool facts and stories about all these wonderful critters. Hope you enjoy!