Saurian Enterprises has been offering captive bred Dart Frogs for over 15 years! We regularly offer the largest selection of Dart Frogs in the US! Also Fruit Flies, Terrariums and related supplies.
My name is Patrick Nabors, and the following is a little information on my business, Saurian Enterprises, it's beginnings and history. Actually it's a lot of information, maybe too much, but I am often disappointed by the “company info” section on websites, they generally barely scratch the surface!
This business is the end result of a lot of different events. I was always interested in the natural world as a kid, and then in my teens and twenties I always enjoyed getting out in the woods and exploring, catching lizards and snakes, and just appreciating all the great things that can be seen and experienced in the outdoors. Sometime in my mid to late twenties I became aware that a lot of different reptiles were being kept in captivity, and began to look into this a bit. I became particularly interested in geckos, and about 1990 I began keeping geckos and some other lizards. At this point I was working in restaurant management, specifically I was the manager of the restaurant and banquet operations at a local country club. I had been working in restaurants about 15 years when I finally quit in 1994. While I enjoyed many aspects of restaurant work, I was becoming bored with it, and the idea that I might be able to do something that involved working with these amazing creatures really inspired me to try to figure out how I could get out of the restaurant field.
In 1994 I opened a small reptile store here in the St. Louis area, called the St. Louis Lizard Company. The store was a great learning experience, and very successful in some ways. It combined a walk in retail store, as well as a mail order store. I say it was successful, since sales increased every month, and the store paid its own way, and the inventory and selection grew greatly over the first18 months. However, I was working for free at that point, and my wife's job was supporting our household, so when she lost her job it really put us in a tough spot. After a period of fruit less job searching, she was offered a great job opportunity in Central Illinois, about two hours away. We decided to move there, and after a few months of trying to run the store from Bloomington, we decided close the shop.
At that point I began focusing on breeding some of the animals we had bred there in the store, such as bearded dragons, basilisks, water dragons, veiled chameleons and several monitor species. I also briefly bred some python species. I had always had an eye on dart frogs, in fact some of the very first animals I had were some E. tricolor that were given to me in about 1991. There were three or four of them, and they bred repeatedly for me, and while I did raise some babies, it was tough finding the right food for them at that time, as they were incredibly tiny. Anyway, it was about this time, 1995, that I really started to get into dart frogs. That year I acquired some D. imitator, D. reticulatus and some tinctorius. At this point I was trading small crickets to a couple of hobbyists for dart frog tadpoles and baby frogs, as I didn't have the funds to invest heavily in dart frogs, I had lost too much money closing the store down! Some of these frogs, acquired in 1995 and 1996, are still part of the breeding stock here.
Over the next three years or so the dart frogs slowly forced the other animals out of the limited area I had for breeding there in my basement in Bloomington Illinois. I found them to be the most interesting of the animals I had worked with, and I especially liked the idea that you could at least begin to approximate a natural setup for them, unlike most other reptiles and amphibians I had seen in the hobby. In addition I became very interested in the environment that these animals come from, tropical rainforests. During this time, my wife and I made a couple of trips to Belize and Costa Rica, and spent some time exploring the beautiful forests of these countries.
In late 2000, we decided to move back to St. Louis, (of course by this time I had something I didn't have when we moved to Bloomington, two little girls, which made every thing a little more challenging!) and by the spring of 2001 we were getting settled in here in our new home. The new place has a much bigger basement, and thus room for lots more frogs. The move really took a while to get over, but eventually we did, and have continued to grow in our new location.
An old friend of mine, a former chef, burnt out from the restaurant business, decided he wanted to try working with frogs and lizards. His name is Jimmie, and his hard work, innovation and dedication have made a huge difference in the business. Our extra space and Jimmie's extra hands have allowed us to really grow!
Once we got settled in here in St Louis, we have, through trial and error, expanded in many ways. Our larger facility has allowed us to offer larger frogs, and even a regular supply of sexed pairs of young adult dart frogs. Also we have begun to offer a variety of terrarium supplies, including plants, decor and backgrounds. All the while we are still trying to provide the best service and advice to our customers possible.
