Water falls

TaraL

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Has anyone put a waterfall in theirs torts enclosure? Any pros or cons for this?
 

Blackdog1714

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Has anyone put a waterfall in theirs torts enclosure? Any pros or cons for this?
Poop oh the poop! Use a ceramic pot base for your water dish/poop zone. If you do a waterfall set it up so it cant be accessed by the tort more for looks.
 

TaraL

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Poop oh the poop! Use a ceramic pot base for your water dish/poop zone. If you do a waterfall set it up so it cant be accessed by the tort more for looks.
Ok cool, I use a plastic paint pan for water we are in Phx AZ and the ceramic gets too hot I was thinking a water fall more for looks and to get a little more natural humidity in his area as we are usually very dry. Thank you for you're response
 

ZEROPILOT

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I've tried and tried to incorporate some sort of a moving water feature into my outdoors enclosures for years..
And it always gets poop fouled..
I'm convinced that it would have to be a heavily planted shallow bog filtered stream of some sort.. but as for me. I've given up.
 

TaraL

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I've tried and tried to incorporate some sort of a moving water feature into my outdoors enclosures for years..
And it always gets poop fouled..
I'm convinced that it would have to be a heavily planted shallow bog filtered stream of some sort.. but as for me. I've given up.
 

glassbird

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I love creating fish ponds, with water falls. I have had several over the years...best described as "moderately sized, yet epic". I loved creating water falls, especially. Some were more successful than others, but I learned a lot and really enjoyed the process. My current living situation is temporary, so I only have one pond running with only one water fall, coming from a whiskey barrel into the pond. Pretty basic.

BUT...last summer I decided to build an outside habitat for my Russian. I wanted some sort of small, but very safe, water feature. Mostly for his hydration needs, but also as a decorative feature. I drew on my pond experience and chose a "pond" that is designed really as a base for an urn, or rock feature, that has water pouring out of it in such a way that the resulting splashes might fall too far from the source and cause it to lose water too quickly. The wide flange around the small reservoir catches most of the splashes and channels them back to the reservoir. I put a small water pump in the bottom of the reservoir surrounded by a plastic mesh bag packed with layers of plain nylon pot scrubbers, and attached the pump to a "spitting fish" via fish-safe tubing. The plastic mesh bag and pot scrubbers serve to keep larger chunks of poop and leaves out of the pump...sort of a filter.

This worked really well. Now, he is a little tortoise, as tortoises go. And I don't know how often, if ever, he pooped in there. There were two large dishes that I know he sat in, a lot! But once a week or so I would run a hose down into the bottom and flush the whole thing from the bottom up. Not long, just enough to stir things up and flush it out. I never had to remove the bag and pump until the end of the season.

The one warning I would give with this set-up is to find large HEAVY dishes to block the reservoir. My first dish was apparently not heavy enough, and he found a way to shove it aside just enough to fall in. I had a Ring camera set up on it...thank God. I casually checked in on him from work and my heart nearly stopped! I called my sister and gasped something incoherent about "turtle, water, help!" and she ran across the yard and pulled him out. I swear, that tortoise. If he can find a problem, he will.
 

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glassbird

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...and for anyone wondering...neither of those pictures show the extensive, and deep, fortifications around the exterior walls. He is a digger, and spends every daylight hour looking for a weak spot. There is hardware cloth and large rocks surrounding the outer walls, dug down at least a foot all around. The inner two walls do not have fortifications, so he has quite happily dug under them and goes between the two areas at will.
 

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