The day Ramona won our hearts

Kendra Billington with her beloved bearded dragon Ramona. Photo: Bruce Barnard.

It was like pre-history crashing head-long into the digital age.

A dinosaur-looking bearded dragon with its scaly front legs draped, femme fatale-like, across a computer keyboard in The Weekend Sun's IT support office.

A lizard from one age hanging in another age. This was Ramona.

'Ramona's not really a girlie pet,” says lizard lover and keeper Kendra Billington. 'She is more kind of butch and spiky.” Like her namesake, Ramona Flowers, the main but ever-so-slightly weird love interest in the cult movie ‘Scott Pilgrim vs the World.'

'I really liked the movie,” says Kendra. So Ramona the sarcastic and charismatic movie presence loaned the name to Ramona the bearded dragon.

It was ‘Take a Pet to Work Day'. Mia the Chihuahua poodle cross lapdog sat appropriately in a lap at a computer terminal all day. No fuss but no fun either. Flo and Adie, a couple of excitable German regulars, bounded around the building between piddles. But when Ramona slunk in the game changed.

'How can a dragon be so adorable? – but it is.” Moments earlier this colleague had winced at first sight of the reptile. 'So cute, I just want to munch her” said a cat person from the design department. Remember this is a lizard. 'I could cuddle and squeeze and love it,” said another. Ramona just stood there, triangular shaped head at a jaunty angle and fixing them with a stare.

Forgivable behaviour from a lizard because she'd just woken from hibernation.

'When I left home I wanted a pet,” says Kendra. 'My friend had a leopard gecko and I didn't want a smelly rat, dog or cat.” She got herself a ‘cool lizard' instead. 'Cool because Ramona is scaly and fascinating and loveable.”

Ramona arrived in Tauranga inside a paper towel in a Tupperware container from Nelson – $300 plus freight. 'I was shaking – and when I took her out she just lay there on my hand. I guess she was scared too.” Ten centimetres head to tail and four grams.

'I loved her from the moment I first saw her,' says Kendra. 'She was so tiny and I thought ‘I am now responsible for her'.” So what's the connection with a lizard – you can't walk it, it won't be wagging at the door when you get home, you can't hug a lizard and they aren't all furry and soft. 'But you can scratch her head and rub under her chin – she loves that.”

And when Ramona wants to hang out Kendra she will scratch on the side of her tank to be let out. And if she doesn't want to hang out she will just run away. 'And when in the same room she will watch you all the time. You move, and her head moves to watch you. She's with you.”'

Lizards, it seems, have their endearing idiosyncrasies, like any pet.

'I removed her basking log from the tank because I was redecorating. She stopped eating for two weeks. I didn't know what her problem was until I put the log back and she jumped straight onto it. I offered her food and she started eating again – she had been fretting for her log.”

The log is back in a tank that cost more than $700 – marine ply with a UVB tube light imported from the USA and a heat lamp to assist the basking process. Basking features big in the 10-15 year life of a lizard, it's their number one inactivity. And blinking, perhaps twice a day.

Ramona has quite specific food requirements – her favourite being wax moth larvae ….scrummy, fatty morsels. 'They are the McDonalds of the lizard world,” says Kendra. She will toss a larvae across the room and Ramona chases and eats it. It's reptilian fetch – but without the fetch bit.

'It's a fun way of exercising her, tossing wax moth larvae around and watching her chasing and munching them.”

Crickets are healthier for Ramona - $40-50 for a bag of 50 live ones. Fresh is best. She sits on her log and when a cricket scuttles by she nails it with her tongue. Dinner is delivered.

She also enjoys meal worms, slaters, locusts and black soldier fly larvae. She will also accept vegetables, and baby food if she's off colour.

But it was vegetables, a tiny diced piece of carrot that almost did for the dragon, almost killed her. It became impacted in her gut. The vet gave her meds to force it through her system.

'She pooped but no carrot.” So Ramona was put to sleep, she was sliced open, the carrot removed and sewed back up again. 'She was just 10 centimetres long,” says Kendra. 'She shouldn't have survived but she did.”

That'll be $1000 said the specialist exotic vet. This lizard isn't cheap to run. 'I had only just got Ramona, she deserved a chance. I didn't want to abandon her and let her die.”

This is the same lizard that will leap off the table and climb Kendra's leg because she wants to be close, she wants to show her affection and appreciation, she wants to hang out with Kendra.

One day Kendra would like another lizard – a rescue lizard perhaps because a lot of would-be lizard lovers don't understand the husbandry or lose interest.

'Once you have had a lizard you never go back – they're like Pringles, you can't stop at one.”

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