Tortoises again

I feel the need to take a break from preschool posting, in part because there are so many preschool mommy blogs out there (most of them very religious) that it frightens me to be a part of that community, and also because I'm drowning in CRAFTS and other such activities, and want to think about something else. Ergo, tortoises.

A month or so ago we decided to get another tortoise. Why, you might ask, since you're planning to leave Ridgecrest in less than a year, would you get another tortoise? And the answer would be... because we can? And soon we'll be back in Colorado where we can't? (You can't take California desert tortoises out of California, it's ILLEGAL.) I guess that's it, we wanted one last tortoise experience.

So Rocket Boy started building a new tortoise burrow. He acquired an irrigation pipe from a local hardware store, about a foot in diameter, and had them cut it about six feet long. Then he took it home and sawed it in half. Then he dug a six-foot long trench, about two feet deep at its lowest point, and set the half pipe in the trench. I found a blue plastic tub at K-Mart and Rocket Boy trimmed it down and cut a half circle out of it so it fit over the pipe, and we got that all fit snugly into the trench. (I should note that only a small section of the burrow is actually in the tortoise pen -- most of the underground part sticks out into the yard. You can see this better in the photo further down the page.)

Then we put an arched paver at the front of the pipe and put mud over it to form a seal as it dried. And then we buried the whole thing with the dirt from the hole.

In the photo below you can see the whole tortoise pen. The opening to the burrow is toward the back, near the black pipe (which is the other half of the pipe we used in the burrow -- we just left it in the pen for tortoise entertainment).

Once the pen and the burrow were ready, we walked over to our neighbor's house and got a couple of tortoises. These are foster tortoises -- we'll just have them this year and then we'll (hopefully) give them up to someone else for adoption. They're both males, but they get along well (males sometimes fight) and happily share the burrow. The one on the left is very old (we call him Grandpa), and the one on the right is a youngster. That may be why they get along.

We're lucky that they're not climbers, because the cinder blocks fencing our pen really aren't high enough -- we should have a double layer all the way around. But it seems to be enough for now.

And here are my big boys, enjoying a little quality time with the tortoises. Each morning after breakfast we go out and give the tortoises some "leaves" (usually dandelion greens, which Stater Brothers carries, since our bare dirt yard has NOTHING, not one thing a tortoise would like to eat).

In about a month, they'll hibernate, and then we probably won't see them until March. After which, we'll probably move. It's crazy, I know. But kind of neat, too. A home with a tortoise (or two) is a happy home.