What type of tortoise do I have?

[Hvt105]

Hello everyone, does anyone know what species of tortoise Totty is?

He was found by my grandad wandering down the motorway just outside of London (UK) 54 years ago, and has been in my family ever since. He hasn’t really changed in size/shape in that time, so we aren’t really sure how old he actually is… or even if he is a he.

 

[wellington]

@TeamZissou
It is a Male and it's either a Greek or a Hermanns. I tagged someone that might know for sure. I'm not the most familiar with the Mediterranean species

 

[Hvt105]

@TeamZissou
It is a Male and it's either a Greek or a Hermanns. I tagged someone that might know for sure. I'm not the most familiar with the Mediterranean species

Thank you, good to know that he is a male!

 

[Yvonne G]

Hermanni

 

[EppsDynasty]

Hello everyone, does anyone know what species of tortoise Totty is?
View attachment 368586View attachment 368583View attachment 368585View attachment 368584
He was found by my grandad wandering down the motorway just outside of London (UK) 54 years ago, and has been in my family ever since. He hasn’t really changed in size/shape in that time, so we aren’t really sure how old he actually is… or even if he is a he.

You may be asked by the experts what his enclosure temperatures, lights and other details are. This is only meant to help you provide the best for him. He is a treasure being that old, you will want to care for him in the best way possible. So glad to have you here. I'm thinking @Yvonne G is saying is Hermans and male. There are western and eastern. There is great help here.

 

[ZEROPILOT]

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[Hvt105]

You may be asked by the experts what his enclosure temperatures, lights and other details are. This is only meant to help you provide the best for him. He is a treasure being that old, you will want to care for him in the best way possible. So glad to have you here. I'm thinking @Yvonne G is saying is Hermans and male. There are western and eastern. There is great help here.

Thanks! Glad to be here!
Do we think he is a western Hermann’s?
In terms of his enclosure… he has a huge run outside over the summer months, and has always been allowed to naturally go into hibernation over the winter (then his sleeping box gets moved into the garage, which keeps at a constant temperature over the winter). In between the two more extreme seasons, like now, he lives in the spare bedroom. He has free roam of the room, with obstacles for him to climb round and some plants. There is a UVB heat lamp at one end of the room where he often has a nap, but can also avoid it if he gets too warm. Indoors his room is always around 20 degrees C.
For diet he eats lots of lettuce, cucumber and dandelions. Those are his preferred options, but he will sometimes also eat fruit. He has zero interest in shop bought tortoise food, but will break into a sprint for a bit of cucumber!
Always happy to listen to tips on keeping him healthy if anyone has any.

 

[Tom]

Thanks! Glad to be here!
Do we think he is a western Hermann’s?
In terms of his enclosure… he has a huge run outside over the summer months, and has always been allowed to naturally go into hibernation over the winter (then his sleeping box gets moved into the garage, which keeps at a constant temperature over the winter). In between the two more extreme seasons, like now, he lives in the spare bedroom. He has free roam of the room, with obstacles for him to climb round and some plants. There is a UVB heat lamp at one end of the room where he often has a nap, but can also avoid it if he gets too warm. Indoors his room is always around 20 degrees C.
For diet he eats lots of lettuce, cucumber and dandelions. Those are his preferred options, but he will sometimes also eat fruit. He has zero interest in shop bought tortoise food, but will break into a sprint for a bit of cucumber!
Always happy to listen to tips on keeping him healthy if anyone has any.

This is an Eastern.

You are making a bunch of mistakes that could cause a disastrous outcome for you, but I don't want to argue and make you mad. Do you want some help with these things, or would you prefer to carry on and have me leave you be?

 

[Hvt105]

This is an Eastern.

You are making a bunch of mistakes that could cause a disastrous outcome for you, but I don't want to argue and make you mad. Do you want some help with these things, or would you prefer to carry on and have me leave you be?

Funny that you assume it will be an argument! If you want to let me know what’s being done wrong kindly then like I said, I’m happy to listen. If you are annoyed by how he has been looked after so far and just want to be critical about that, then as I can’t change the past I probably would be less keen to hear that…

Up until about a month ago he was still living with my grandmother, but she has started to struggle to look after him so he will probably be permanently with me. This is still new for me, and I want to make sure he is a healthy tortoise who lives as long as he naturally should.

In conclusion, yes I’m happy to receive advice

 

[NELSUN737]

Funny that you assume it will be an argument! If you want to let me know what’s being done wrong kindly then like I said, I’m happy to listen. If you are annoyed by how he has been looked after so far and just want to be critical about that, then as I can’t change the past I probably would be less keen to hear that…

Up until about a month ago he was still living with my grandmother, but she has started to struggle to look after him so he will probably be permanently with me. This is still new for me, and I want to make sure he is a healthy tortoise who lives as long as he naturally should.

In conclusion, yes I’m happy to receive advice

HE'S BEEN LOVED THATS ALL THAT MATTER, KEEP YOUR GRANDPARRENT DIET AND LET HIM BEE LOVE!
I HAVE 2 BABY AFRICAN SPURS (HOMEBOY AND HOMEGIRL)AND THEY EAT LIKE ELEPHANTS!
I ALSO HAVE A RECUE TERRAPIN NAME DONNY!
DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE CRITIC'S SOME PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO HELP IN THEIR SUPREME WAY!
GOOD LUCK BUD, LOTS OF LOVE!

 

[HZB]

Hello,

Just to add some friendly welcome to the conversation, your Totty and our Wander could definitely sit down and compare notes! Wander is an Eastern Hermann's who wandered (see where the name comes from?) into my partner's family's garden thirty years ago. She recently moved in with us when my grandparents-in-law could no longer care for her enough.

She was my grandma-in-law's pride and joy, but even though Marion belonged to a postal tortoise fancier's club and tried to care for her according to the best advice at the time, tortoise care standards had outpaced her by the end and we've definitely seen Wander gain a new lease of life on starting a new chapter with us.

I'll leave the experts to give you guidance if you want it on lighting and brumation and so forth, but I thought you might benefit from some tips about what we found as we adjusted to becoming tortoise guardians:

• Tortoises need hydration - so much more than stereotypes tell us they do. Wander was accustomed to being offered the odd sip here and there, and when she moved in with us and was allowed to wallow in a shallow dish and to drink as much as she wanted (from both ends!) that was all she did for a few days poor thing. Now she gets as much hydration as she needs from her food and regular baths (which she loves) we don't see her drink as much, but it was shocking at first how obvious it was she needed more water. Her shell and scales and eyes and basically everything look so much better for it too.
• If your tortoise is an old guard tortoise like ours, it's no wonder he likes cucumber and lettuce and fruit best, because that's what he's been eating for decades. As I'm sure you realise by now, Hermann's are supposed to eat weeds and the only fruit they encounter in nature would be occasional windfall or low hanging fruit - but we've told Wander that until we're blue in the face and she just laughs at us. We get around this by growing tortoise-safe stuff in seed trays (https://www.shelledwarriorsshop.co.uk/seeds---grow-your-own-food-302-c.asp) and offering that as well as small amounts of the human veg she's used to. That's in her indoor pen. When she's outside she grazes properly, but at least this set up indoors means we know when she's really hungry she'll eat a proper diet and not just tortoise junk food! She won't eat weeds if they're not growing - clearly tearing them out of the ground is quite important to her, so it's worth seeing if it seems that way to Totty too. Also, when Wander came out of her first brumation with us she ate like a horse, and entirely indiscriminately, so it was a prime time to sneak a better diet into her. In hindsight we could perhaps have gone cold turkey on offering her human veg at that point, but it's on our list for next year now because once she was less hungry she went back to being selective.
• Keep records! If you imagine you might have Totty for many more decades, it'll be very useful - not to mention interesting - to know what his personal patterns are. For example, Wander went into brumation last year a certain weight, came out having lost a safe amount, and then within days put on almost exactly the right amount to match her pre-brumation weight to the letter (digit?). It was so reassuring for us as new guardians to see that she had it under control. According to various more experienced tortoise folk than us, it's very typical for individual tortoises to follow similar patterns of activity, weight, movement etc year on year, so keeping records is really helpful for planning their care and spotting any deviance that might be cause for concern. Also, please benefit from our mistake and avoid writing said records illegibly in a book - get yourself a nice smart spreadsheet sorted from the get-go so you don't have to transfer it all down the line *sighs*.
• Hermann's don't want to live in the UK, and they get pissy about our weather (I mean, at this point I want a UVB lamp too so no offence taken). Totty, like Wander, was almost certainly taken from the wild as they weren't really bred at that time period. Imagine growing up in a nice southern bit of the Mediterranean and then finding yourself stuck in London. Also, apparently they can feel weather fronts, so don't be surprised if Totty seems to have weather-dependant moods. Wander will often just nap through stormier days - presumably dreaming she'll wake up to blue skies and refreshed, dustless Mediterranean scrub. I'm not saying they can't survive here or thrive with us, but I personally think it's my job to make up where I can for the fact that when Wander wakes up from a short healthy brumation and expects to get about her business under the sun, she can't. Obviously some of that is about the type of bulb/bulbs you offer, but I also think it's about giving her time outside in short snatches when the weather is safe and pleasant, and about making her inside pen interesting when it's not. I'm sure that everyone and their tortoise has a different sense of what enriches inside life, but for Wander, it's the following (in no particular order):
  • Foraging for food instead of just eating it - we use guinea pig/rabbit pen toys for this. She has her cucumber on a special pet skewer hanging securely from above, so she has to get her beak into it just right to 'catch' it : https://www.petscorner.co.uk/rosewood-chrome-plated-fruit-holder . We put lettuce leaves into a pet manger for similar reasons: https://www.petscorner.co.uk/small-animal/toys/hanging-ball-treat . I realise lots of individual animals would find this stressful, but Wander definitely enjoys it, so perhaps Totty might too. We also sometimes hide the cucumber and lettuce about her pen to change things up, although it's hit and miss whether she'll eat them off the ground.
  • Giving her the option to rearrange her pen and things in it to interact with. Again, this definitely would appeal to some individuals more than others, but Wander is a confident bruiser. Her favourite things to interact with are tunnels - she has a cardboard one made for rabbits, a massive cork tube, and a section of drainage pipe in her outside pen. She pushes them around as well as going through them. The science suggests she should like them as hides, or as a sign that she might be able to access a new environment through them, but she's not dumb - I think she's more than aware that they're toys and just plays with them. She'll go through them when she could go around them just as easily. One of my favourite things I've ever seen her do was go through her cork tunnel, dribble her ball with a bell in it (which let's not lie, she normally couldn't care less about) along for a few paces, then make a right turn into her cardboard tunnel and then come out the far side and head over to bask and nap. It was like tortoise agility! In addition to the tunnels, she moves her substrate around (she has smooth slates and coco coir), she looks in her bird mirror, she takes the odd nibble from her cuttlefish bone, and she clambers about. I know you've said Totty has lots of obstacles already in his room (lucky lad, to have a room of his own!), so this might not be new info, but as a proviso you might not have thought of yet, just check if anything he regularly interacts with has sharp edges. When Wander is inside, she paces more than we'd like, whereas outside she just patrols now and then. So inside obstacles often get stomped over in the same way day after day, and we realised to our mortification that Wander had some sore scratches on her lower shell from the bricks she was marching over every day. She loves climbing, and the bricks are fine outside, but inside she clearly needed something softer-edged, like sanded wood blocks, given how often she was stomping and sliding over them.
  • Interaction - Wander is very sociable and like to be chatted to and visited. For reasons of space, she lives in a pen we built ontop of our bathtub, which is bad for any notions we might have of bathing ever again, but ideal for her in terms of how often we see her and chat to her. You can also train tortoises if that's something you're interested in training. I haven't tried with Wander yet but the tortoise training idea I've come across and liked most was to teach them to recall to the sound of a fence post being struck repeatedly - the logic being they can feel the vibrations through the ground, so if they do escape and have learned reinforcement to recall to that sound/feeling they might come back. Since Wander once escaped her outside pen by ramming herself through a wire gap she definitely shouldn't have fit through, and was fortunately spotted moving at about a million miles per hour into the adjacent paddock, I suspect this would be a useful skillset!
• Last but not least, remember that living with a tortoise is an awesome privilege, even if other people think you're nuts to be so interested in them! Most pets aren't the same age or older than their people, and it's a really special dynamic to be able to witness an animal with such a well developed character over such a long time. Persist in introducing your naive non-tortoise owning friends and family to Totty and they'll soon realise the error of their ways. That's when you pick the most infatuated of the bunch and tell them they'll be opening the brumation fridge door once a day for a week when you go away next January 😂

Good luck and keep us posted, Totty is lucky to be in your family, and Wander says hello <3

 

[Dorothy]

Hello everyone, does anyone know what species of tortoise Totty is?
View attachment 368586View attachment 368583View attachment 368585View attachment 368584
He was found by my grandad wandering down the motorway just outside of London (UK) 54 years ago, and has been in my family ever since. He hasn’t really changed in size/shape in that time, so we aren’t really sure how old he actually is… or even if he is a he.

Looks like a hermann

 

[Alex and the Redfoot]

Hello,

Just to add some friendly welcome to the conversation, your Totty and our Wander could definitely sit down and compare notes! Wander is an Eastern Hermann's who wandered (see where the name comes from?) into my partner's family's garden thirty years ago. She recently moved in with us when my grandparents-in-law could no longer care for her enough.

She was my grandma-in-law's pride and joy, but even though Marion belonged to a postal tortoise fancier's club and tried to care for her according to the best advice at the time, tortoise care standards had outpaced her by the end and we've definitely seen Wander gain a new lease of life on starting a new chapter with us.

I'll leave the experts to give you guidance if you want it on lighting and brumation and so forth, but I thought you might benefit from some tips about what we found as we adjusted to becoming tortoise guardians:

• Tortoises need hydration - so much more than stereotypes tell us they do. Wander was accustomed to being offered the odd sip here and there, and when she moved in with us and was allowed to wallow in a shallow dish and to drink as much as she wanted (from both ends!) that was all she did for a few days poor thing. Now she gets as much hydration as she needs from her food and regular baths (which she loves) we don't see her drink as much, but it was shocking at first how obvious it was she needed more water. Her shell and scales and eyes and basically everything look so much better for it too.
• If your tortoise is an old guard tortoise like ours, it's no wonder he likes cucumber and lettuce and fruit best, because that's what he's been eating for decades. As I'm sure you realise by now, Hermann's are supposed to eat weeds and the only fruit they encounter in nature would be occasional windfall or low hanging fruit - but we've told Wander that until we're blue in the face and she just laughs at us. We get around this by growing tortoise-safe stuff in seed trays (https://www.shelledwarriorsshop.co.uk/seeds---grow-your-own-food-302-c.asp) and offering that as well as small amounts of the human veg she's used to. That's in her indoor pen. When she's outside she grazes properly, but at least this set up indoors means we know when she's really hungry she'll eat a proper diet and not just tortoise junk food! She won't eat weeds if they're not growing - clearly tearing them out of the ground is quite important to her, so it's worth seeing if it seems that way to Totty too. Also, when Wander came out of her first brumation with us she ate like a horse, and entirely indiscriminately, so it was a prime time to sneak a better diet into her. In hindsight we could perhaps have gone cold turkey on offering her human veg at that point, but it's on our list for next year now because once she was less hungry she went back to being selective.
• Keep records! If you imagine you might have Totty for many more decades, it'll be very useful - not to mention interesting - to know what his personal patterns are. For example, Wander went into brumation last year a certain weight, came out having lost a safe amount, and then within days put on almost exactly the right amount to match her pre-brumation weight to the letter (digit?). It was so reassuring for us as new guardians to see that she had it under control. According to various more experienced tortoise folk than us, it's very typical for individual tortoises to follow similar patterns of activity, weight, movement etc year on year, so keeping records is really helpful for planning their care and spotting any deviance that might be cause for concern. Also, please benefit from our mistake and avoid writing said records illegibly in a book - get yourself a nice smart spreadsheet sorted from the get-go so you don't have to transfer it all down the line *sighs*.
• Hermann's don't want to live in the UK, and they get pissy about our weather (I mean, at this point I want a UVB lamp too so no offence taken). Totty, like Wander, was almost certainly taken from the wild as they weren't really bred at that time period. Imagine growing up in a nice southern bit of the Mediterranean and then finding yourself stuck in London. Also, apparently they can feel weather fronts, so don't be surprised if Totty seems to have weather-dependant moods. Wander will often just nap through stormier days - presumably dreaming she'll wake up to blue skies and refreshed, dustless Mediterranean scrub. I'm not saying they can't survive here or thrive with us, but I personally think it's my job to make up where I can for the fact that when Wander wakes up from a short healthy brumation and expects to get about her business under the sun, she can't. Obviously some of that is about the type of bulb/bulbs you offer, but I also think it's about giving her time outside in short snatches when the weather is safe and pleasant, and about making her inside pen interesting when it's not. I'm sure that everyone and their tortoise has a different sense of what enriches inside life, but for Wander, it's the following (in no particular order):
  • Foraging for food instead of just eating it - we use guinea pig/rabbit pen toys for this. She has her cucumber on a special pet skewer hanging securely from above, so she has to get her beak into it just right to 'catch' it : https://www.petscorner.co.uk/rosewood-chrome-plated-fruit-holder . We put lettuce leaves into a pet manger for similar reasons: https://www.petscorner.co.uk/small-animal/toys/hanging-ball-treat . I realise lots of individual animals would find this stressful, but Wander definitely enjoys it, so perhaps Totty might too. We also sometimes hide the cucumber and lettuce about her pen to change things up, although it's hit and miss whether she'll eat them off the ground.
  • Giving her the option to rearrange her pen and things in it to interact with. Again, this definitely would appeal to some individuals more than others, but Wander is a confident bruiser. Her favourite things to interact with are tunnels - she has a cardboard one made for rabbits, a massive cork tube, and a section of drainage pipe in her outside pen. She pushes them around as well as going through them. The science suggests she should like them as hides, or as a sign that she might be able to access a new environment through them, but she's not dumb - I think she's more than aware that they're toys and just plays with them. She'll go through them when she could go around them just as easily. One of my favourite things I've ever seen her do was go through her cork tunnel, dribble her ball with a bell in it (which let's not lie, she normally couldn't care less about) along for a few paces, then make a right turn into her cardboard tunnel and then come out the far side and head over to bask and nap. It was like tortoise agility! In addition to the tunnels, she moves her substrate around (she has smooth slates and coco coir), she looks in her bird mirror, she takes the odd nibble from her cuttlefish bone, and she clambers about. I know you've said Totty has lots of obstacles already in his room (lucky lad, to have a room of his own!), so this might not be new info, but as a proviso you might not have thought of yet, just check if anything he regularly interacts with has sharp edges. When Wander is inside, she paces more than we'd like, whereas outside she just patrols now and then. So inside obstacles often get stomped over in the same way day after day, and we realised to our mortification that Wander had some sore scratches on her lower shell from the bricks she was marching over every day. She loves climbing, and the bricks are fine outside, but inside she clearly needed something softer-edged, like sanded wood blocks, given how often she was stomping and sliding over them.
  • Interaction - Wander is very sociable and like to be chatted to and visited. For reasons of space, she lives in a pen we built ontop of our bathtub, which is bad for any notions we might have of bathing ever again, but ideal for her in terms of how often we see her and chat to her. You can also train tortoises if that's something you're interested in training. I haven't tried with Wander yet but the tortoise training idea I've come across and liked most was to teach them to recall to the sound of a fence post being struck repeatedly - the logic being they can feel the vibrations through the ground, so if they do escape and have learned reinforcement to recall to that sound/feeling they might come back. Since Wander once escaped her outside pen by ramming herself through a wire gap she definitely shouldn't have fit through, and was fortunately spotted moving at about a million miles per hour into the adjacent paddock, I suspect this would be a useful skillset!
• Last but not least, remember that living with a tortoise is an awesome privilege, even if other people think you're nuts to be so interested in them! Most pets aren't the same age or older than their people, and it's a really special dynamic to be able to witness an animal with such a well developed character over such a long time. Persist in introducing your naive non-tortoise owning friends and family to Totty and they'll soon realise the error of their ways. That's when you pick the most infatuated of the bunch and tell them they'll be opening the brumation fridge door once a day for a week when you go away next January 😂

Good luck and keep us posted, Totty is lucky to be in your family, and Wander says hello <3

Thank you for your time to write all this! Incredible and very intersting post! I wish we had more like this!

 

[MaNaAk]

Hermanni

I agree Yvonne. Certainly not Greek as I have a Greek Spur-thighed Tortoise.

Natrah

 

[Tom]

Funny that you assume it will be an argument!

It happens often. New people join and in an effort to help them sort out problems that we see, I or someone else tells them about what is wrong. Some people say thank you. Some people get offended and feel attacked. I just try to prevent the latter when possible. I usually just blurt out what I see and what should be done about it, but in your case I decided to ask first, since I don't know you well enough to know which way it would go.

Check this out for the correct care info, and questions are welcome:

Info For New People. Please Read This First.

Hello and welcome to tortoiseforum.org! We are all glad you are here! There is no other forum like this anywhere. We have tens of thousands of members from all over the world ranging from kids with their first tortoise to people who have been breeding and keeping high end tortoises since the...

tortoiseforum.org

 

[MaNaAk]

Hello,

Just to add some friendly welcome to the conversation, your Totty and our Wander could definitely sit down and compare notes! Wander is an Eastern Hermann's who wandered (see where the name comes from?) into my partner's family's garden thirty years ago. She recently moved in with us when my grandparents-in-law could no longer care for her enough.

She was my grandma-in-law's pride and joy, but even though Marion belonged to a postal tortoise fancier's club and tried to care for her according to the best advice at the time, tortoise care standards had outpaced her by the end and we've definitely seen Wander gain a new lease of life on starting a new chapter with us.

I'll leave the experts to give you guidance if you want it on lighting and brumation and so forth, but I thought you might benefit from some tips about what we found as we adjusted to becoming tortoise guardians:

• Tortoises need hydration - so much more than stereotypes tell us they do. Wander was accustomed to being offered the odd sip here and there, and when she moved in with us and was allowed to wallow in a shallow dish and to drink as much as she wanted (from both ends!) that was all she did for a few days poor thing. Now she gets as much hydration as she needs from her food and regular baths (which she loves) we don't see her drink as much, but it was shocking at first how obvious it was she needed more water. Her shell and scales and eyes and basically everything look so much better for it too.
• If your tortoise is an old guard tortoise like ours, it's no wonder he likes cucumber and lettuce and fruit best, because that's what he's been eating for decades. As I'm sure you realise by now, Hermann's are supposed to eat weeds and the only fruit they encounter in nature would be occasional windfall or low hanging fruit - but we've told Wander that until we're blue in the face and she just laughs at us. We get around this by growing tortoise-safe stuff in seed trays (https://www.shelledwarriorsshop.co.uk/seeds---grow-your-own-food-302-c.asp) and offering that as well as small amounts of the human veg she's used to. That's in her indoor pen. When she's outside she grazes properly, but at least this set up indoors means we know when she's really hungry she'll eat a proper diet and not just tortoise junk food! She won't eat weeds if they're not growing - clearly tearing them out of the ground is quite important to her, so it's worth seeing if it seems that way to Totty too. Also, when Wander came out of her first brumation with us she ate like a horse, and entirely indiscriminately, so it was a prime time to sneak a better diet into her. In hindsight we could perhaps have gone cold turkey on offering her human veg at that point, but it's on our list for next year now because once she was less hungry she went back to being selective.
• Keep records! If you imagine you might have Totty for many more decades, it'll be very useful - not to mention interesting - to know what his personal patterns are. For example, Wander went into brumation last year a certain weight, came out having lost a safe amount, and then within days put on almost exactly the right amount to match her pre-brumation weight to the letter (digit?). It was so reassuring for us as new guardians to see that she had it under control. According to various more experienced tortoise folk than us, it's very typical for individual tortoises to follow similar patterns of activity, weight, movement etc year on year, so keeping records is really helpful for planning their care and spotting any deviance that might be cause for concern. Also, please benefit from our mistake and avoid writing said records illegibly in a book - get yourself a nice smart spreadsheet sorted from the get-go so you don't have to transfer it all down the line *sighs*.
• Hermann's don't want to live in the UK, and they get pissy about our weather (I mean, at this point I want a UVB lamp too so no offence taken). Totty, like Wander, was almost certainly taken from the wild as they weren't really bred at that time period. Imagine growing up in a nice southern bit of the Mediterranean and then finding yourself stuck in London. Also, apparently they can feel weather fronts, so don't be surprised if Totty seems to have weather-dependant moods. Wander will often just nap through stormier days - presumably dreaming she'll wake up to blue skies and refreshed, dustless Mediterranean scrub. I'm not saying they can't survive here or thrive with us, but I personally think it's my job to make up where I can for the fact that when Wander wakes up from a short healthy brumation and expects to get about her business under the sun, she can't. Obviously some of that is about the type of bulb/bulbs you offer, but I also think it's about giving her time outside in short snatches when the weather is safe and pleasant, and about making her inside pen interesting when it's not. I'm sure that everyone and their tortoise has a different sense of what enriches inside life, but for Wander, it's the following (in no particular order):
  • Foraging for food instead of just eating it - we use guinea pig/rabbit pen toys for this. She has her cucumber on a special pet skewer hanging securely from above, so she has to get her beak into it just right to 'catch' it : https://www.petscorner.co.uk/rosewood-chrome-plated-fruit-holder . We put lettuce leaves into a pet manger for similar reasons: https://www.petscorner.co.uk/small-animal/toys/hanging-ball-treat . I realise lots of individual animals would find this stressful, but Wander definitely enjoys it, so perhaps Totty might too. We also sometimes hide the cucumber and lettuce about her pen to change things up, although it's hit and miss whether she'll eat them off the ground.
  • Giving her the option to rearrange her pen and things in it to interact with. Again, this definitely would appeal to some individuals more than others, but Wander is a confident bruiser. Her favourite things to interact with are tunnels - she has a cardboard one made for rabbits, a massive cork tube, and a section of drainage pipe in her outside pen. She pushes them around as well as going through them. The science suggests she should like them as hides, or as a sign that she might be able to access a new environment through them, but she's not dumb - I think she's more than aware that they're toys and just plays with them. She'll go through them when she could go around them just as easily. One of my favourite things I've ever seen her do was go through her cork tunnel, dribble her ball with a bell in it (which let's not lie, she normally couldn't care less about) along for a few paces, then make a right turn into her cardboard tunnel and then come out the far side and head over to bask and nap. It was like tortoise agility! In addition to the tunnels, she moves her substrate around (she has smooth slates and coco coir), she looks in her bird mirror, she takes the odd nibble from her cuttlefish bone, and she clambers about. I know you've said Totty has lots of obstacles already in his room (lucky lad, to have a room of his own!), so this might not be new info, but as a proviso you might not have thought of yet, just check if anything he regularly interacts with has sharp edges. When Wander is inside, she paces more than we'd like, whereas outside she just patrols now and then. So inside obstacles often get stomped over in the same way day after day, and we realised to our mortification that Wander had some sore scratches on her lower shell from the bricks she was marching over every day. She loves climbing, and the bricks are fine outside, but inside she clearly needed something softer-edged, like sanded wood blocks, given how often she was stomping and sliding over them.
  • Interaction - Wander is very sociable and like to be chatted to and visited. For reasons of space, she lives in a pen we built ontop of our bathtub, which is bad for any notions we might have of bathing ever again, but ideal for her in terms of how often we see her and chat to her. You can also train tortoises if that's something you're interested in training. I haven't tried with Wander yet but the tortoise training idea I've come across and liked most was to teach them to recall to the sound of a fence post being struck repeatedly - the logic being they can feel the vibrations through the ground, so if they do escape and have learned reinforcement to recall to that sound/feeling they might come back. Since Wander once escaped her outside pen by ramming herself through a wire gap she definitely shouldn't have fit through, and was fortunately spotted moving at about a million miles per hour into the adjacent paddock, I suspect this would be a useful skillset!
• Last but not least, remember that living with a tortoise is an awesome privilege, even if other people think you're nuts to be so interested in them! Most pets aren't the same age or older than their people, and it's a really special dynamic to be able to witness an animal with such a well developed character over such a long time. Persist in introducing your naive non-tortoise owning friends and family to Totty and they'll soon realise the error of their ways. That's when you pick the most infatuated of the bunch and tell them they'll be opening the brumation fridge door once a day for a week when you go away next January 😂

Good luck and keep us posted, Totty is lucky to be in your family, and Wander says hello <3

Hello Totty and Wander,

I am Jacky a Greek Spur-thighed Tortoise!

 

[MaNaAk]

Hello Totty and Wander,

I am Jacky a Greek Spur-thighed Tortoise!View attachment 368641

I'm 88 how old are you two?

Jacky

 

[Hvt105]

Hello,

Just to add some friendly welcome to the conversation, your Totty and our Wander could definitely sit down and compare notes! Wander is an Eastern Hermann's who wandered (see where the name comes from?) into my partner's family's garden thirty years ago. She recently moved in with us when my grandparents-in-law could no longer care for her enough.

She was my grandma-in-law's pride and joy, but even though Marion belonged to a postal tortoise fancier's club and tried to care for her according to the best advice at the time, tortoise care standards had outpaced her by the end and we've definitely seen Wander gain a new lease of life on starting a new chapter with us.

I'll leave the experts to give you guidance if you want it on lighting and brumation and so forth, but I thought you might benefit from some tips about what we found as we adjusted to becoming tortoise guardians:

• Tortoises need hydration - so much more than stereotypes tell us they do. Wander was accustomed to being offered the odd sip here and there, and when she moved in with us and was allowed to wallow in a shallow dish and to drink as much as she wanted (from both ends!) that was all she did for a few days poor thing. Now she gets as much hydration as she needs from her food and regular baths (which she loves) we don't see her drink as much, but it was shocking at first how obvious it was she needed more water. Her shell and scales and eyes and basically everything look so much better for it too.
• If your tortoise is an old guard tortoise like ours, it's no wonder he likes cucumber and lettuce and fruit best, because that's what he's been eating for decades. As I'm sure you realise by now, Hermann's are supposed to eat weeds and the only fruit they encounter in nature would be occasional windfall or low hanging fruit - but we've told Wander that until we're blue in the face and she just laughs at us. We get around this by growing tortoise-safe stuff in seed trays (https://www.shelledwarriorsshop.co.uk/seeds---grow-your-own-food-302-c.asp) and offering that as well as small amounts of the human veg she's used to. That's in her indoor pen. When she's outside she grazes properly, but at least this set up indoors means we know when she's really hungry she'll eat a proper diet and not just tortoise junk food! She won't eat weeds if they're not growing - clearly tearing them out of the ground is quite important to her, so it's worth seeing if it seems that way to Totty too. Also, when Wander came out of her first brumation with us she ate like a horse, and entirely indiscriminately, so it was a prime time to sneak a better diet into her. In hindsight we could perhaps have gone cold turkey on offering her human veg at that point, but it's on our list for next year now because once she was less hungry she went back to being selective.
• Keep records! If you imagine you might have Totty for many more decades, it'll be very useful - not to mention interesting - to know what his personal patterns are. For example, Wander went into brumation last year a certain weight, came out having lost a safe amount, and then within days put on almost exactly the right amount to match her pre-brumation weight to the letter (digit?). It was so reassuring for us as new guardians to see that she had it under control. According to various more experienced tortoise folk than us, it's very typical for individual tortoises to follow similar patterns of activity, weight, movement etc year on year, so keeping records is really helpful for planning their care and spotting any deviance that might be cause for concern. Also, please benefit from our mistake and avoid writing said records illegibly in a book - get yourself a nice smart spreadsheet sorted from the get-go so you don't have to transfer it all down the line *sighs*.
• Hermann's don't want to live in the UK, and they get pissy about our weather (I mean, at this point I want a UVB lamp too so no offence taken). Totty, like Wander, was almost certainly taken from the wild as they weren't really bred at that time period. Imagine growing up in a nice southern bit of the Mediterranean and then finding yourself stuck in London. Also, apparently they can feel weather fronts, so don't be surprised if Totty seems to have weather-dependant moods. Wander will often just nap through stormier days - presumably dreaming she'll wake up to blue skies and refreshed, dustless Mediterranean scrub. I'm not saying they can't survive here or thrive with us, but I personally think it's my job to make up where I can for the fact that when Wander wakes up from a short healthy brumation and expects to get about her business under the sun, she can't. Obviously some of that is about the type of bulb/bulbs you offer, but I also think it's about giving her time outside in short snatches when the weather is safe and pleasant, and about making her inside pen interesting when it's not. I'm sure that everyone and their tortoise has a different sense of what enriches inside life, but for Wander, it's the following (in no particular order):
  • Foraging for food instead of just eating it - we use guinea pig/rabbit pen toys for this. She has her cucumber on a special pet skewer hanging securely from above, so she has to get her beak into it just right to 'catch' it : https://www.petscorner.co.uk/rosewood-chrome-plated-fruit-holder . We put lettuce leaves into a pet manger for similar reasons: https://www.petscorner.co.uk/small-animal/toys/hanging-ball-treat . I realise lots of individual animals would find this stressful, but Wander definitely enjoys it, so perhaps Totty might too. We also sometimes hide the cucumber and lettuce about her pen to change things up, although it's hit and miss whether she'll eat them off the ground.
  • Giving her the option to rearrange her pen and things in it to interact with. Again, this definitely would appeal to some individuals more than others, but Wander is a confident bruiser. Her favourite things to interact with are tunnels - she has a cardboard one made for rabbits, a massive cork tube, and a section of drainage pipe in her outside pen. She pushes them around as well as going through them. The science suggests she should like them as hides, or as a sign that she might be able to access a new environment through them, but she's not dumb - I think she's more than aware that they're toys and just plays with them. She'll go through them when she could go around them just as easily. One of my favourite things I've ever seen her do was go through her cork tunnel, dribble her ball with a bell in it (which let's not lie, she normally couldn't care less about) along for a few paces, then make a right turn into her cardboard tunnel and then come out the far side and head over to bask and nap. It was like tortoise agility! In addition to the tunnels, she moves her substrate around (she has smooth slates and coco coir), she looks in her bird mirror, she takes the odd nibble from her cuttlefish bone, and she clambers about. I know you've said Totty has lots of obstacles already in his room (lucky lad, to have a room of his own!), so this might not be new info, but as a proviso you might not have thought of yet, just check if anything he regularly interacts with has sharp edges. When Wander is inside, she paces more than we'd like, whereas outside she just patrols now and then. So inside obstacles often get stomped over in the same way day after day, and we realised to our mortification that Wander had some sore scratches on her lower shell from the bricks she was marching over every day. She loves climbing, and the bricks are fine outside, but inside she clearly needed something softer-edged, like sanded wood blocks, given how often she was stomping and sliding over them.
  • Interaction - Wander is very sociable and like to be chatted to and visited. For reasons of space, she lives in a pen we built ontop of our bathtub, which is bad for any notions we might have of bathing ever again, but ideal for her in terms of how often we see her and chat to her. You can also train tortoises if that's something you're interested in training. I haven't tried with Wander yet but the tortoise training idea I've come across and liked most was to teach them to recall to the sound of a fence post being struck repeatedly - the logic being they can feel the vibrations through the ground, so if they do escape and have learned reinforcement to recall to that sound/feeling they might come back. Since Wander once escaped her outside pen by ramming herself through a wire gap she definitely shouldn't have fit through, and was fortunately spotted moving at about a million miles per hour into the adjacent paddock, I suspect this would be a useful skillset!
• Last but not least, remember that living with a tortoise is an awesome privilege, even if other people think you're nuts to be so interested in them! Most pets aren't the same age or older than their people, and it's a really special dynamic to be able to witness an animal with such a well developed character over such a long time. Persist in introducing your naive non-tortoise owning friends and family to Totty and they'll soon realise the error of their ways. That's when you pick the most infatuated of the bunch and tell them they'll be opening the brumation fridge door once a day for a week when you go away next January 😂

Good luck and keep us posted, Totty is lucky to be in your family, and Wander says hello <3

Thank you for this. Sounds like there were a lot of free roaming tortoises when our grandparents (and grandparents-in-law) were younger, or at least a lot of escapees!

Great tips all round! I have noticed that Totty is already trained (and by that I probably mean that he has trained me) to some extent. His bedroom door is always open, we have blocked off the doorway so we can see him whenever we walk past. He will often rush over to say hello, and to prove that he has us trained, we always get him extra food.

We have already started to grow a few bits and pieces for him, but I hadn’t thought of having a few different seed trays that he could directly pull lunch from. I’ll check out the link you sent and order a selection. He’s a stubborn fella, so we will have see if we can convince him to have a bit more of a healthy varied diet! I know how he feels, I don’t always want to eat all the veg either.

Totty spent a few months with only concrete under-foot and he has been left with some grazes on his belly. That was a few years ago now, when he was moved to a spot whilst there were builders working on the back of my grandmother’s house. He seems to have healed ok, but the patches probably won’t go away now. Because of that I’ve avoided having hard surfaces for him to climb over, but the suggestion of different surfaces making sure edges are curved to walk over and around is great. I like the idea of rabbit and bird toys for a bit of added enrichment.

I honestly do feel quite privileged to be taking on his guardianship, so I will be trying to give him the best possible living conditions. I also look forward to reading more of Wander’s adventures. Maybe they were pals in a previous life.

 

[Hvt105]

I'm 88 how old are you two?

Jacky

Totty has been with us for 54 years, but given that he hasn’t got any bigger in that time, I suppose he is at least 64!

 

[MaNaAk]

Totty has been with us for 54 years, but given that he hasn’t got any bigger in that time, I suppose he is at least 64!

Jacky is probably bigger because she is actually Jacqueline.