Hi everyone, Humphrey has an indoor and an outdoor enclosure, for the majority of time he is indoors because he sleeps inside overnight. Now that it’s getting warmer I’ve been trying to leave him in his outdoor enclosure during the day but when he’s out there, he’ll eat and then he’ll go burrow in the shaded area of the enclosure. Any idea why he might be doing this?
10 month old Hermann’s sleeps/hides in outdoor enclosure during the day?
- Thread starter mmags
- Start date
Because baby tortoises are very vulnerable to predation and rarely expose themselves. If they did, their species would not survive. There is hardly anything published on what baby tortoises do in the wild, and the period from hatching to adulthood is sometimes referred to as "the lost years".
In practice, it isn't good for babies to be outside all day. I've done several side by side experiments with clutch mates of several species over many months to determine this fact. They grow at 1/3 the speed of their mostly indoor counterparts on the same amount of the same food, with all other variables being the same, and they pyramid. I even have them sleeping indoors in the same enclosure at night and soaking daily in the same tubs side by side. My general rule of thumb is one hour of outside time per inch of tortoise, and not every day for new hatchlings. Once they are about 4-5 inches, I will sometimes leave them out for most of the day, when weather permits. As adults, outside full time with a proper temperature controlled shelter is great, but babies do better when kept mostly indoors.
It will still be normal for small ones to hide a lot outside, but in time they get desensitized and more bold.
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