Hello from South Florida (Palm County)

Vpvarano

New Member
Joined
Dec 14, 2019
Messages
19
Location (City and/or State)
Boynton Beach, FL
Hello!

My name is Verónica and I leave in South Florida. I am a biologist and I work in a wildlife hospital as an Animal Caregiver.
I am actually from Venezuela, where my family and I had a beautiful male Yellow-foot Tortoise that lived around 25 years (He arrived home when I was around 5 years old), his mane was Manacale (it reads in Spanish). We also had a young female Red-foot that we had just for a few years, her name is Chiquita (also in Spanish). We got her from another family member when she was relatively young and was just a few years with us. We decided to give her in adoption because Manacale used to harassed her all day long to mate (which they couldn’t since they where different species) and the space we had wasn’t enough for two grown up tortoises. The person who adopted her was a farmer that lived in the country and had a couple for her (of the same species, lol!), he keeps them free and they have already have many babies. This means a lot to me because both species are now considered threatened in the wild due to habitat loss + pet trade and it is important to breed them and let them go free.

Now I leave in Hot-Sunny-Humid Florida. I never realized how much I missed my tortoises until I started to see them at work. Then I realized I have had live with a tortoise most of my live and I didn’t have any! So, I had a while already thinking on getting one.
The moment came in Thanksgiving Day when I decided to adopt an awesome Russian male that had almost 2 moths waiting for adoption at the place where I work. Even when we just take wild animals and don’t accept exotic pets, somehow we always end up taking care of some exotic pets, and some of them take a while to be adopted. He was always trying to scape of his habitat and that’s what made me fall in love with him! Now I have Walter! He is 4-1/2’’ long, healthy, handsome and Super Active!
The original plan was to make him a nice outdoor enclosure around 64 square feet, but we still haven’t decide where would be the best place for him. Also I don’t like the fact that the yard gets sprayed with insecticides almost every month! And it is not up to me to decide stop spraying, since I just live renting a part of the house. So, right now he’s living inside and everyday I take him outside to walk with supervision, so he doesn’t eat anything. I preferred to have him safely inside until I speak with the spraying guy and then, make a decision if he’ll live inside permanently (while we live in this house) or if we could find the way to have him safe outside.

Thanks for reading me! I will be posting some questions about indoor enclosures since I never had a tortoise living inside before.

P.S.: I haven’t figured out how to upload pictures yet. I’ll drop some soon!

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