Tortoise Hunt!

I like to visit the Turtle Sanctuary and play with the tortoises. My favorite part is rounding them up in the evening and putting them in their houses for the night.

I'm pretty good at finding their favorite hiding spots. Tortoises are like Easter-eggs with feet.

Some of them are very heavy.

I had thought all the really big tortoises had gone to zoos recently. I was wrong.

The turtle sanctuary also has a lot of birds. Turkeys, peacock, ducks, and lots and lots of chickens.

I'm not sure there's anything quite as silly as a hen trying to brood a tortoise like an egg.

Turtles.

I discovered a few years ago that, when you have birds, people give you birds. This summer I learned that birds aren't the only thing that works like that. It all started when I began teaching my annual Animals and Art class, and got back in touch with a family who brings in their reptiles every year. If you are a weird and interesting person who owns a lot of strange animals, you end up making friends with other weird and interesting people who own a lot of strange animals. Then, when someone tosses you another unwanted creature, you have a whole network of people who might like to add it to their menagerie.

My friends have tortoises and had divided their enclosure to make a space for the box turtle, but she had been sitting in a corner and refusing to eat, and they weren't sure what else to do with her. After reading quite a bit about box turtles, I still had a few questions, so I called the awesome turtle sanctuary in town. I've read about the sanctuary a lot and was dying to visit, but it has been closed to the public for a while.

So we made plans to go visit and I started building a turtle enclosure in my yard. In the interest of being sustainable, green, and cheap, I asked the local Freecycle mailing list for some old boards. I was immediately offered a few 2x4's and also a second box turtle.

When you love exotic animals and someone offers you one they clearly have no clue how to care for, the answer is always "yes". Freed from a life of boredom in a plastic tub with a small dusting of potting soil, Turtle #2 immediately took to a life of burrowing in the yard and foraging for fruit and bugs. I took the turtles to the sanctuary with me and learned that they were both girls, and I got to see all the wonderful turtles, tortoises, snakes, lizards, and birds at the sanctuary. When I described my turtles' enclosure and diet, they offered me a couple of boy turtles to keep them company.

And that is how I ended up with four three-toed box turtles. They are a lot of fun to watch, they each have distinct personalities and favorite spots to hang out. It turns out that Turtle #1 is just grumpy by nature and prefers to spend her time hiding. Now that we have convinced her to each something other than peaches, she has relaxed quite a bit. She still immediately turns into a box whenever I pick her up, though.