Circumstances have dictated that we’ve become a bit of a tortoise sanctuary. I get enormous pleasure from my handful of little hinge back tortoises. They, sadly, do not get as much pleasure from me… but there you are… they are a lesson in unconditional love really.
Every time we travel, I come home to jubilant welcomes from my pups and cats. Not to mention Mandova. Heartwarming stuff. The tortoises couldn’t really give a flying… nobody thunders out to greet me.
Tommy, the original chap, did find his way into my office the other day. I was ecstatic. He dropped a large turd and exited. I guess that was a request for indoor plumbing, who knows. We have a little way to go on house training.
We are up to 5 tortoises now.
Because my lovely household know how much pleasure I get from seeing them (I feel like I am living in a nature reserve when I sit on the verandah and a tortoise wanders by), they call me every time one is spotted. Because I am the only one who can tell them apart, I spend a lot of time looking at the same tortoise, who has moved a few metres and then been spotted again by my lovely man or Mandova. I actually don’t mind, I am grateful for their thoughtfulness and I do like seeing the little fellows.
We are still relatively ignorant on tortoises but what I can advise is there is a lot of sex. A lot. This has, inevitably, resulted in babies. Eggs, they lay eggs. The girls take weeks and weeks of rumbling around and digging holes to get to the point of actually producing anything. During this time, the sex doesn’t stop. There should be a crime line they can phone.
But, last night, my old girl, Tummy laid eggs. Great excitement. She is the biggest and presumably the oldest (ages are a secret not shared), and she’s really battered. Perhaps there was an errant lawnmower in her past. Doesn’t stop her getting lucky it appears.
So, she laid some eggs. Nowhere near any hole that had previously been dug. She laid them on the pathway paving. And crushed one of them during her labours it seems.
On the morning of the evening birth, she was quietly having a drink of water when she was rudely pushed into the water bath and assaulted from behind. She probably still doesn’t know by who. When I asked her this morning who the dad of this lot were, she advised that how do you even know what baked bean actually makes you fart?
This morning, Tommy was wooing her again. Straight after a night of labour! Rude.
So, now we have eggs. Whether they are fertilised or not is an unknown. They are surprisingly large. Apparently the survival rate is quite low because nurturing is not really in the nature of a tortoise. I gave Tummy some mushrooms and cucumbers this morning and congratulated her. She was not enquiring of what I had done with her growing babies. Not mum of the year this one.
A friend advised me that I need an incubator for the eggs. I informed my lovely man who said ‘wot, do they have incubators in the wild then, maternity wards and health care?’
Guess the eggs are taking their chances.
