After growing up chasing lizards in the deserts through the late ’80s and early ’90s, I started keeping and breeding jacksons, veiled and “blue” panther chameleons in 2001 on a small scale as “Bluebeast Reptile.” Things slowly expanded through 2003, and by 2004, I was producing a surprising amount of chameleons monthly in a few different species. Almost out of luck, I turned out to be pretty good at what I was doing with these exotic and fragile creatures. I was heavily involved in the chameleon market through late 2007 when a few factors forced me to redirect my reptile addiction. More than anything, I was working many hours in my normal job, on top of being a single dad from a previous marriage, that I didn’t have the proper time to care for the 200+ chameleons I had on hand at any given time. With all the cage cleaning, cricket care and everything else that comes with it, I was stretched thin for time, and started to feel some chameleon burnout coming on (as anyone with multiple chameleons knows, it’s a lot of work).
After getting married in early 2008, I managed to drag my new wife, Sarah, into this business with me, put all of the effort into the tortoises and weaned ourselves off of the chameleons that I had kept for so many years. I always had many of the tortoises running around, just never put the entire focus on them until that point. It’s been refreshing to start something new, market something different and make a whole new set of friends in the industry while maintaining the old ones. Because of a good, established reputation in the reptile world, we kept the name “Bluebeast Reptile” after the switch to tortoises, and in 2010, we slowly transitioned over to “Tortoise Supply.” Tortoises have been much easier for us to handle being in the desert of Oklahoma, and it offers us more time to spend afternoons together as a family, and to be able to get out of town when we need a vacation. Since nothing in the tortoise world happens very fast, we are young and patient, so we will be just fine.
Sarah and I were both born and raised in Northwest America USA, and live here still. We have known each other since we were kids, but didn’t date until a few years after college. We both come from large families, and spend much of our free time with them both here in Oklahoma and in parts of Utah. We love to go RVing with several other similar life-staged families on a regular basis all over Nebraska, Utah, Nevada, California, and Idaho. Sarah is a hairdresser part time, tortoise caretaker full time, and full time mom with our 6 wild boys, and is definitely the foundation of our family. Hunter, my eighteen-year-old son, recently graduated high school and moved to Utah to start school there. Every one of his little brothers wants to be just like him when they grow up. Mack, our twelve year old, is our “office manager” and helps us gather supplies from various nooks and crannies in the house to pack in shipments. He packs 90% of the supply orders and helps us maintain inventory on things we are running low on. He has become quite the UTV driver (off road) and lately has driven some pretty impressive 50 mile trips in a Polaris RZR 570 with a little brother as a co-pilot and navigator. Wyatt is our eleven year old daredevil that is always eager to impress. He likes doing tricks on his ATV at the sand dunes. Gage is our nine year old monster and carries our shipments from the office to stack them by the front door for the UPS pick-up (one at a time, in about a five minute round trip, usually getting side-tracked on the way back). Dexter is our dimpled six year old blonde boy who melts hearts wherever he goes. He was our third attempt at getting a daughter. The final boy (again, boy) Ridge is our 4 year old “baby.” He has no fear, and will go on any carnival ride or bounce house that his brothers go on without hesitation. He has had a scab or scar on some part of his face since as long as I can remember. All of our boys work hard and are very involved in the tortoise business from packing seeds and herbal hay to pre-assembling shipping boxes. I work day-to-day as a commercial concrete estimator, do most of the care for the adult tortoises, egg laying and incubation, all our website work and e-mails, sideliner beekeeper, and am very active in the local off road side-by-side groups and race UTVs in the pro turbo class of the DP4 series, and rally class at Legacy and BITD series (desert racing). We also have a bengal cat, big dog Diesel, and albino gopher snake to complete our family.