Saturday, September 19, 2009

Toby the Turtle

Well, I guess we can officially announce that our family now has a new member. Toby the Turtle! :)

I spent forever last night researching turtles and I now know more about them than I ever thought I would! Toby is most likely a Greek Tortoise. That's the picture he most likely resembles, anyway. He looks like a cranky old man and I like him. :) We never found out where he came from, but the top of his shell is a little beat up, it almost looks like he skidded across the pavement on it or something and there is grass embedded in it, so I think he's been through some sort of adventure outside.

Today we went and bought him a nice turtle house. He lives in a big fish tank in our den. We figured out the lights he needs and the food he eats and all of that. It is a little complicated at first because his habitat has to stay at a certain temperature during the day and a certain humidity level and he has to have UV light, so we had to figure out heat lamps and UV lights and temperature and humidity gages and all of that. But now that we have him all set up he should be fairly low maintainence. He eats veggies and fruit, so I'm just keeping a bowl of spinich and shredded carrots in the fridge that I can feed him each day, and I also cut up a little strawberry and banana for him.

We also found out that turtles can live for 50 years!! So if all goes well, we may have Toby for a very long time!

He's really kind of fun to watch! The kids are having a good time with him. We're all such soft hearted animal lovers that we get a little silly when an animal shows up at our house. Although Shawn said that if a puppy shows up in our driveway tomorrow he's putting his foot down. :)

I'm going to take photos of him in a little bit and I'll post them on my blog. I think he's been traumatized enough for now, so we're leaving him alone for a bit to get used to his new house before we play with him too much.

So there's the story of Toby the turtle. There's always something exciting going on around here! :)

1 comment:

Michael B. said...

The house we are in came with a tortoise named Dinky - he has lived in the back yard for nearly 30 years so the landlord did not want to move him.

We love having him, totally low maintenance because he just roams the yard and eats from the bushes. We put out some treats for him every couple days.

He will go into his burrow in October and hibernate until April! Now that's a great pet!