RedHeadMama
New Member
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2017
- Messages
- 10
Hi, I'm so glad to finally have time to sit down and post! In February, my family and I adopted a 7-inch female RedFoot from a friend whose child became allergic to her bedding. Lily is sweet and sociable, and loves watching TV with our kids (hilarious to see her sitting right beside them in her aquarium, gazing through the glass at PBS cartoons!). We live in Virginia in a 100-year-old house that has occasionally caused some issues with keeping her heat and humidity where it should be (see my post in Tortoise enclosures), but we're experimenting with different set-ups to try to give her the best of all worlds. When the summer truly hits us, she will spend a lot of time outside in our backyard (she's had a few backyard days already and seems to really love the variation).
Lily is our first tortoise, although we had several aquatic turtles before our children were born; with all the complications of trying to keep their tank and water clean AND care for a newborn human baby, we gave them up to a local nature center when our first two boys were babies. Compared to an aquatic environment, we're finding the tropical tortoise setup MUCH easier to care for!
Currently Lily is in a 40-gallon aquarium, but we want to put her in something bigger to give her more space. Her substrate is a mixture of coconut coir and cypress mulch, and she hides in a big Boston fern. She has grown a bit (an 8th or 1/4 of an inch of shell?) since we got her, so we are getting her a bigger water dish, since she no longer fully fits into the one that came from her past home. We feed her a mixture of Mazuri, mixed vegetables, leafy greens and spring mix, dandilion blossoms, and fruit, with a calcium supplement mixed in. She gets fed every other day, and on non-feeding days she gets a 15-30-minute warm bath and lots of talking and petting. Right now she has the 100W ZooMed heat/UVB bulb and a SunBeam humidifier that blows directly into her tank (thanks to the plumbing department at Lowe's!) and has adjustable mist output and humidity levels.
Overall, I'm excited to be a part of the Tort community here and to learn more from all of you experienced tort keepers! Oh, and on that note--any thoughts as to whether a female RedFoot needs/would benefit from a companion tortoise?
Thanks!
Lily is our first tortoise, although we had several aquatic turtles before our children were born; with all the complications of trying to keep their tank and water clean AND care for a newborn human baby, we gave them up to a local nature center when our first two boys were babies. Compared to an aquatic environment, we're finding the tropical tortoise setup MUCH easier to care for!
Currently Lily is in a 40-gallon aquarium, but we want to put her in something bigger to give her more space. Her substrate is a mixture of coconut coir and cypress mulch, and she hides in a big Boston fern. She has grown a bit (an 8th or 1/4 of an inch of shell?) since we got her, so we are getting her a bigger water dish, since she no longer fully fits into the one that came from her past home. We feed her a mixture of Mazuri, mixed vegetables, leafy greens and spring mix, dandilion blossoms, and fruit, with a calcium supplement mixed in. She gets fed every other day, and on non-feeding days she gets a 15-30-minute warm bath and lots of talking and petting. Right now she has the 100W ZooMed heat/UVB bulb and a SunBeam humidifier that blows directly into her tank (thanks to the plumbing department at Lowe's!) and has adjustable mist output and humidity levels.
Overall, I'm excited to be a part of the Tort community here and to learn more from all of you experienced tort keepers! Oh, and on that note--any thoughts as to whether a female RedFoot needs/would benefit from a companion tortoise?
Thanks!
