Gopher Tortoise

From the Rescue Files

I teach different classes off an on at the local college but whatever class I may or may not teach; I always teach in the summer enrichment program that's offered by the college for elementary school children, it's called Kid's College. There are about two hundred different classes offered for kids whose ages range from 6-13, I teach the class called Reptiles and Rodents.

In June of 2003 we had our usual turtle and tortoise day, and as usual we had a variety of them for the kids to see. We had box turtles, painted turtles, mud turtles, map turtles, snapping turtles, and the big attraction, as always was the sulcata tortoise.

I told the kids why tortoises are different from turtles, why box turtles and tortoises are different from aquatic turtles, and why real snapping turtles live in water. We teach them what each species eats, how it should be housed among other things. Suffice it to say the kids left knowing a whole lot more about turtles and tortoises than they knew before they came to class.

A really odd coincidence happened on that turtle/tortoise day, one of the boys in that class found a tortoise on his driveway later in the evening. It was odd because there are no wild tortoises that live in this area. The next day was Thursday and the boy came to class telling me about a tortoise he found the night before, just a few short hours after he'd seen all those turtles and the tortoise in class. It was in his driveway his mother had said, "Someone is going to have to get out of the car and move that turtle so I can get the car in." He got out of the car, moved it and said "Hey it's not a turtle, it's a tortoise," he knew the difference. I talked him into bringing it to me the next Monday when we had class again.

I assumed this was going to be someone's lost pet but we needed to identify the species. When I finally saw this tortoise I could not believe my eyes, it was a Texas gopher tortoise. We are too far northwest of gopher tortoise territory so I couldn't believe that this is what was on his driveway when he got home from Church the Wednesday night before. The only thing we could think of is that this tortoise must have been stolen out of his territory and then kept as a pet by a neighbor of this little boy. The tortoise must have either gotten loose or the owner's found out that it's illegal to keep a protected species as a pet without a permit and let him go.

We'll never know how that tortoise got here but we do know where he went. I thought seriously about applying for the permit and keeping him but I couldn't bring myself to do that to him. With a sulcata living here as well as two box turtles who spend much of their time on summer days outside in the pen, we didn't really want to keep a species known to be a carrier of Mycoplasma ssp. pneumonia either. Based on his robust health that had not yet been ruined by a clueless person we decided he hadn't been captive for very long. He was obviously not accustomed to being handled by humans and did not appear to be tame in any way. We felt that he needed to be back in the wild where he belongs. He should be breeding and making more gopher tortoises so that maybe one day they won't need to be protected. We decided that the best thing to do was to contact authorities right away.

I talked the boy into letting me take care of this so that I could be sure the right thing was done for this gorgeous hunk of male tortoise.

I called the local game warden; there's a Texas Parks & Wildlife office here in town so getting this tortoise into the hands of the authorities wasn't going to be a problem. What surprised me though was the fact that the Captain in their office thought this is a tortoise we could just release outside the city limits. I told him "No, he's not from here he needs to be moved" so the Captain got in the Internet, let me show him where to go for Texas reptile information. That's when he found that hey wow, my gosh this woman is right, he's not from here.

So they took a lot of photos of this tortoise just like I did. Then they kept him, I told them what to feed him for the weekend until he could be moved. A few days later I found out that they'd had him picked up by another game warden who then passed him off to still another game warden and in the end this tortoise ended up in Del Rio, where he belongs. A very happy ending for this big fellow. Is he gorgeous or what?