Hydro
New Member
Hello everyone! I have quite a story for all of you to start my time on this forum. I work at a pet store south of Chicago, and this past weekend we had a reptile show nearby. I love reptiles and was sort of sad to have work the whole weekend, but now I'm glad I was there! This lady came in one night, saying she had "a turtle her kids found in the park" (whether or not this is the actual case is debatable). So I get called over, since everyone else knows I'm the one who loves anything cold-blooded, and even though I'm no tortoise expert I immediately recognized it as a young Sulcata tortoise. I could also tell the shell didn't seem quite right. She claims it was wandering in a park about 2 blocks from our store and she doesn't know what to do with it, but couldn't just leave it there. She apparently asked everyone there if they knew where it came from, and nobody did. My guess is either somebody bought it at the herp show and then abandoned it when they learned more about it, or some kid took it home and the parents said to get rid of it. Possibly the lady was even the parent getting rid of it. Unfortunately, our store can't take in abandoned animals, but I was loath to send her back out into 40 degree weather with this poor tortoise. So, being the overly-eager bleeding heart that I am, I personally took the little guy (or gal) from her and warmed it up under a spare heat lamp. He perked right up and immediately was trying to dig, splashing through the small water dish, and just generally causing havoc in the spare tank. After getting him home, he was eager to eat some spare timothy hay that I keep for my gerbil and equally happy to see a nice half-log hide to sleep in after. I did a little research, ending up here on this forum very often, and discovered the name for his shell problem is "pyramiding", which I am now trying to prevent getting any worse with a lot of moisture in his hide. I still don't have a very appropriate setup, but thanks to the info on here it's my top priority right now. I plan on building a nice enclosed one in my house and using Tom's method of cement blocks so he can go outside (supervised since he's so tiny and we get coyotes) when it warms up a bit. I'm adding a nice pic of him munching some hay, and I've also been giving him some fresh grass that's just coming up, and some mixed greens dusted with calcium. I plan to try and keep his diet mostly grass, though it'll be a bit tough at first since it's all really short still. Anyway, thank you all for this wonderful forum, I plan to utilize all the information here to give this little Sulcata a good home until I can find someone to take him... or more likely I fall in love and end up keeping him.