Happy Birthday, Buttercup!

Our 'big' little Marginated tortoise Buttercup turned 1 year old today. She has grown so much since I got her in July! Today she weighed in at 138g.

One whole year old! 

I am just amazed at how quickly baby tortoises grow. Buttercup has more than doubled her weight in 4.5 months! Her new growth is very smooth, and her initial pyramiding (from the time before I had her) is less noticeable.

She is more than twice the size she was when I first got her. 

I suspect that by next year, I will need two hands to hold her safely... Happy Birthday, wee Buttercup!

Baby Marginateds update

Today's post is just for fun: The baby Marginated tortoises continue to thrive and grow - they are such a joy! Caring for baby tortoises definitely is more work than caring for adults or sub-adults... but these wee little treasures sure make up for it in cuteness. They are healthy, and active, and I have a feeling they will be big before I know it. 

Bubbles, hatched Sept 8, 2013

First, here is Bubbles. She is the darker of the two babies, and she is actually a full month younger than Blossom (the lighter baby). She was just so huge when she hatched, that she slipped in with the older babies when the breeder offered me the batch to choose from. She was less than 2 weeks old when she arrived here.

Bubbles, hatched Sept 8, 2013

Bubbles is the darkest of all the babies the breeder had, and she was 16g when I got her. She was 32g when I weighed her a week ago. I would be worried about her growing too quickly, but her growth is sooooo smooth. I am curious to see how big she ends up being as an adult!

She won't fit in my hand like this for long!

Bubbles is very friendly, and when it comes to food, downright greedy. She will climb over the other two to get to a leaf she wants. She stomps through the water dish, climbs up and over the half-log hide, and then digs in really deep in the hot humid hide (which is a little rubbermaid shoebox, with a hole cut out for a door, filled with moist coconut coir and sphagnum moss).

Just a bit more cuteness for you to enjoy

Whenever I walk by the baby tank, Bubbles stomps up to the front to see if I am bringing any food. Oink!

Blossom, hatched Aug. 8, 2013

Blossom, the lighter of the Marginated babies, is doing really well, too. She is a little more shy, but she eats well, is active, loves to explore, and really loves to bask, bask, bask. She spends more time under the basking lamp than either of the other two - I have to make sure to mist her shell often to keep it from drying out (which can result in pyramiding).

Blossom, hatched Aug. 8, 2013

When I weighed her a week ago, she was 24g, which is smaller than Bubbles, but still an acceptable weight gain for a hatchling. Different tortoises grow at different rates. Her mother may have been younger and smaller, or her unusually light coloring may mean she is a bit of a genetic oddball. Only time will show. As long as her growth is steady, I am happy.

Blossom on the left, Bubbles on the right.

When keeping multiple tortoises, it is always important to make sure one is not bullying the other, and that one is not hogging the food, heat lamp, etc. - this is not the case with my 3 (so far). As they grow, I will continue to monitor them closely. Their enclosure is set up in our living room, so I see them all throughout the day.

Bubbles, with her nice round shell

I think it makes a big difference where in your home you keep your pets. If they are out of the way, it is easier to forget about them, to accidentally neglect them. We keep our critters in our living room, dining room, and entryway - places we pass by many times every day. We enjoy visiting the torts on our way past.

Blossom, looking cute and dainty

Walking past the tortoises, or being able to see them from the couch (or during the Summer, from the outdoor seating area) also has the advantage that we can see if there is trouble: if one of them flips over, or one is being bullied, or any number of other things that can happen. Of course there is the fact that they are just plain fun to watch...

Some day, I will have to hold each of them with two hands!

Have I mentioned that baby tortoises are just about the cutest thing ever?

Buttercup, hatched Thanksgiving day, 2012

Buttercup is doing wonderfully well, too. She will be a year old this month, and she has grown SO MUCH since I got her in July! She weighed 60g when I got her, and as of today, she weighs 112g! I love how domey her shell is becoming. She is spunky, and she definitely knows that I'm the food-bringer. When she sees me, she RUNS over to the feeding spot in the enclosure!
Her new growth is coming in very smoothly, and by the time she is an adult, I think the slight pyramiding from her first 8 months (not with me) will be barely noticable.

Buttercup will probably be bigger than my hand by this time next year! 

Baby tortoises are cute, but I also really look forward to watching them grow into big(ish), majestic animals. Some day I'll be able to post before/after pictures, showing them as tiny hatchlings and fully grown adult beauties!

*cough* more baby tortoises ?! *cough*

You might remember me mentioning that our tortoise family is complete. You might also know that I'm a huge sucker for tiny baby tortoises.

Just out of the box - one still has the red nail polish mark from the breeder

When I got Buttercup (the almost-yearling Marginated tortoise) I knew that at some point down the line I wanted to get more, to form a small breeding group eventually. Well, to make a long story short,  an opportunity came up that it would have been folly to pass up, and now we have two more baby Marginated tortoises.

Parmesan Cheese? Nope, baby tortoises!

These two tiny girls were shipped to me, and arrived safely this morning. The FedEx guy placed the box on the ground with the 'This way UP' arrow prominently pointing DOWN, but the tortoises were so well packaged that they were just fine.

Sorry it's a little blurry - I was too excited to get them out!

I know that I call Buttercup a 'baby' tortoise, and she is. But these wee creatures are truly BABY tortoises. They are about 1 and 3/4 inches long (less than 4.5cm). Their tiny belly buttons have just healed over, and they only have one growth ring so far. They each weigh 16g - which is about 5x smaller than Buttercup. Can you imagine that they will grow 425x larger in the course of their life (to about 6800g or up to 15lbs)?!

Buttercup looks like a giant now!

I refer to the babies as 'girls' because they were incubated at temperatures that should result in females. Tortoises, like many other reptiles, are sexed based on the temperature the eggs are kept at, did you know that? It will likely be another 5 or more years before we know for sure though.

Meet Blossom (L) and Bubbles (R). 

I got to choose these two out of several clutches. They are unrelated, and I picked the darkest of all the babies, and the lightest of all the babies. It will be interesting to see what they look like as adults. Marginated tortoises don't differ much visually, once they are grown up, but I am sure we will be able to tell them apart.

Exploring a little

After the wee Marginated babies had soaked, I set them into the enclosure to bask. They moved around and explored, one of them even nibbled on the weeds I offered, and then they dug themselves into the spaghnum moss of their hot humid hide.

I provide artificial UVB for them indoors, but once it was warm enough outside, I also brought them out and let them explore the safe little planted baby tortoise garden for a few hours. Natural sunlight is so good for them, and I hope they will be off to a good start for years of nice smooth growth. I know their breeder gave them the best start a baby could possibly hope for.

Buttercup meets a snail V2.0

Our little Marginated tortoise got to meet another snail. It finally rained here, so there were quite a few in our garden - I think these are European snails. People are always surprised to see them in our area. Regardless, the design on this particular snail's shell looked really pretty, so before feeding it to our redfoot tortoise, I took a few pictures of it with on top of Buttercup. 

Giving snails a ride makes me grumpy! (Or maybe that's just my face)

I found a nice sunny spot on a rock in your back yard that was the perfect staging area for these pictures. No flash or extra lighting was necessary.

Weeee!

Hopefully in the next year or so we will have some home-hatched Russian tortoise babies... which will start out about the same size as this snail!

Two beautiful shelled creatures...

On a side note, it is a real pain to rinse snail trail off of a tortoise shell. It's not quite water soluble, and kind of sticky. I don't put anything but water on Buttercup's shell, so I finally just scrubbed it a little with an old toothbrush.

Snail Cozies?!!!

I promise you that I have NOT gone off the deep end. ;) I just like to crochet, and I like to giggle. One of my clients asked me to crochet a tiny lacy stegosaurus cozy for her baby tortoise, which happens to be the same size as our baby marginated tortoise, Buttercup. I had a little bit of the yarn left over... and so, not wanting to waste it, I made a snail cozy! I couldn't stop laughing, and so I took some pictures for you:

Buttercup and snail. Snail is being shy.

A snail in a cozy. What is this world coming to?!

Neither tortoises nor snails need cozies... but both are very funny!

Who wouldn't giggle about a snail in a cozy?!

I hope this made you smile just a little... or maybe laugh out loud?

The tortoise nursery

Keeping a hatchling tortoise involves a little more work than caring for a juvenile or adult tortoise. It helps that our little Marginated tortoise Buttercup had a really good start in life - she is healthy, spunky, active, eats well, and even self-hydrates (aka she drinks on her own!).

Buttercup, our wee Marginated baby

I thought some of you might like to see the 'nursery' I set up for her. She has one that is indoors, where she sleeps and spends her mornings, and one that is outdoors, which I move about a bit to provide both sun and shade.

The tortoise nursery

I purchased this large rubbermaid bin, and used a dremel cutting wheel to cut out most of the plastic lid. Then I zip-tied hardware cloth into that area (hardware cloth is similar to chicken wire, but has much smaller holes). This will help protect Buttercup from hawks, crows, cats, or whatever else might come through our yard during the daytime.

I filled the bin halfway with ACE topsoil. It has no fertilizer and no perlite. I included a little hill, a cave, some rocks, a water dish (which used to be a lid for some container), and a bunch of hens-and-chicks and weeds (dandelion, plantain, violet, thistle) from the yard. Of course Buttercup decided to burrow into the dirt outside of the cave, making her own... and she dug up some of the plants and/or ate them. Tortoises are such little tanks!

Buttercup, exploring

I mist the whole enclosure several times a day - letting the soil surface dry out in between. I also soak Buttercup in shallow, warm water for about 20 minutes daily. As mentioned above, I end up moving the bin a few feet at a time to provide sunshine and shade. Around 4pm it gets hot enough in the side yard where the tortoises live that Buttercup digs down into the soil. Then she comes back out around 6 to snack and explore some more.

Buttercup chomping pieces off of the cuttlefish bone

Baby tortoises have a lot of growing to do, and to grow healthy bones and a healthy shell, tortoises need a lot of calcium. I provide cuttlefish bones in both of Buttercups nursery bins, and am delighted to see that she helps herself to it.

Cuttlefish bones are a good source of calcium!

Look at how big she is opening her mouth to take a bite! She nibbles on the cuttlefish bone almost daily.

The bottom line for a good tortoise nursery: protection from predators, good substrate, humidity, warmth, food, shelter, calcium, water. Keeping baby tortoises hot and humid results in beautiful, smooth shells (along with good food, good natural UVB light, and calcium). I will change the landscape in there periodically to keep it interesting and stimulating. She will likely out-grow this container by next Spring, but for now it is just right!

Our baby Marginated tortoise has a name!

I think I have settled on a name for our little Marginated tortoise. My husband called her a "margarine" tortoise the other day, which brought me to butter, which brought me to 'Buttercup' - if she really turns out to be female, and some day we get a male, then we'll name him Wesley. ;)

Little Buttercup seems to be settling in really well. She has eaten every day, is active and curious, and loves to explore. She seems to enjoy her daily soaks, and doesn't hide when I mist her.

I move her big tub outside every afternoon so that she can catch some natural sunshine. She seems to like being out there, and it will be fun to watch her explore when I've built her a larger outdoor enclosure. 

I measured and weighed her yesterday. Buttercup is 2.5" long (6.35cm) and weighs 60g. I look forward to watching this spunky little one grow and thrive!