9/3/20 An amazing morning! Two desert tortoises! Around 8:30am, Gilbert came driving up our driveway to tell me that a tortoise was crawling down the Cascabel Road. I followed him back down our driveway on foot; when I got to the road, I could immediately see a large tortoise about 80 feet to the east. Gilbert told me that the tortoise had been walking right down the road, not crossing it. That is a very dangerous habit for such a creature, as there is no shortage of half-wit, high-speed drivers who roar down the road daily at excessive speeds, churning up great clouds of dust and killing plenty of creatures that cannot get out of the way in time.
The tortoise was an adult, 11-12 inches in length, the second largest one I had ever seen. I gently picked it up and placed it off of the road, pointing it toward the safety of Charlie Thomas’s bosque.
Amazing. In all the yards we have lived here, we have never had a sighting of a desert tortoise on our land. I walked back home, then sat down with Kath under the ramada to watch birds. Incredibly, some ten minutes later I swept my gaze across the woodland to the north, and there, not 50 feet away, was a second adult tortoise!! This one was 9-10 inches in length. We photographed it at a distance so as to minimize disturbing the animal. I watched as it walked northward, disappearing onto Elna’s land as it crossed under the fence line.
These tortoises have a very different manner of walking than the ornate box turtles we have been seeing every day here of late. Box turtles sort of shuffle along, dragging their plastrons on the ground. Desert tortoises raise themselves high off of the ground as they travel, extending their powerful legs so that their plastrons are elevated; the adult that we watched heading north held its plastron a good 3 inches above the ground as it walked.
