During my daily phone call home to my husband AKA Tortoise Sitter/Slave.. I asked him to check the incubator knowing that I had some eggs due to hatch any day.. "nothing doing our Lass" was his response. Now usually after a hatchlings 'pips' the shell it can take anything from 3 hours to 3 days for the little thing to hatch out. I had some new eggs laid a few days ago and just was doing a check to see if there are any signs of life yet, and to my great surprise, there were a

This morning I was up against the clock as usual, getting the torts fed before I have to get to work. I entered Hermann Hall and to my surprise ... there was Dolly in the middle of laying eggs. Im always very cautious of disturbing a laying female as they can be easily put off and will retain eggs until the conditions are right again.. Normally I slowly reverse from the tortoise house and tip toe away.. This morning I really hadn't the time to stand on any such ceremony and q

So while the tortoises were sleeping and snoozing throughout the winter I scoured my favourite etherial shopping mall aka Ebay, for a bargain double T5 Light controller. To my joy I found the very thing.. only arcadia will do for me. Once the spring emerged and so did the Tortoises.. It was time to fit this state of the art kit. It had horrified me towards the end of last summer when I had replaced my usual T8 tubes with their promise of 12% UVB and Vit D3. The shocking readi

Theres nothing more likely to put you off your breakfast than finding one of your beloved Tortoises injured or having had a mishap. Tortoises don't think like humans.. The way of the tortoise is to never go round things and politely say excuse me.. they only go over things, under things or just plain straight through them. So at 6.30am the last thing you want to see is one of your beloved torts with a red raw head. During the nightly 'pile on' sleeping scramble to get settle

Today a local field released to me the best gift a tortoise keeper with 36 mouths to feed could bestow. The best crop of broad leaf plantain a mad tortoise lady could ever hope for. A seemingly dried up and baron few acres has been hiding such wonders from me for 37 yrs! Yes, I have lived in the vicinity of this field for all that time and never ventured in. Who would think that this ... Would contain this... which would yield me this...... Nearly 2 kilos of the best .. When