This article was written on July 7, 2003, and may not be reprinted or copied, whole or in part, without written permission from the author!
My First Year With Harpo...
Harpo's story began during Thanksgiving of 2001, when I got an email from Katrina Smith, the Rescue and Adoptions Coordinator for the Mid Atlantic Turtle & Tortoise Society. She said there was a 20 pound female sulcata in West Virginia living in someone's bathtub and she needed a foster home. Well, I reluctantly agreed to foster this tortoise til spring, so she put me in touch with the owner, who was more than willing to bring his tortoise to me.
It was the first week of December by the time my new foster child arrived, and as soon as I saw this child, I immediately knew that she was a male! The name he came with was "Oprah", so at the suggestion of my cousin, we changed his name to Harpo, which is Oprah spelled backwards. (Thanks Suzie!) My husband, Wesley, thought I had truly lost my mind, and started telling everyone I was trying to turn our house into Jurassic Park...
Harpo began his life here in our unfinished basement because it was entirely too cold then to keep him outdoors, and I had been told sulcatas are WAY too destructive to keep in our living area like a dog or cat. He weighed in at 23 pounds and was 17 inches long at the time he came here - and he was supposed to be only 4-5 years old! No matter how prepared I thought I was to live with a sulcata, I'm here to tell you that I was SADLY MISTAKEN!!! If you're thinking of taking on a sulcata as a pet, read on....
My first project was to get Harpo on a correct diet. He had been eating mostly microwaved pumpkin, and had a severe case of diarrhea when he got here. That took about a month to work its way out of his system, and I cannot do this situation justice by merely TELLING you about it - you'd have to EXPERIENCE it to understand. We found that our local whole foods market sold dandelion greens, so I was buying a dozen or so bunches a week (to the tune of $2.49 each). My husband's nephew gave me several bales of nice soft orchard grass hay for Harpo, and once he got used to it, he ate it like it was going out of style, although the hay that lined his pen rapidly got "pulverized" and needed to be replaced often. I bought and planted many varieties of opuntia (prickly pear) cactus to grow as part of his diet - I had pots and pots of them, some without spines, some with small ones - my mom bought me a small blow torch (of all things) for Christmas that year to take care of the ones with spines... Harpo absolutely INHALED these cactus pads - I could not grow enough to keep up with demand! I also got some Mazuri Tortoise Diet, that he took to with no problem whatsoever - he ate 25 pounds of it in the blink of an eye, so I started ordering this from the feed store on a regular basis. In between, Harpo ate kale and collards, and he cleaned me out of all the pumpkin and butternut squash I had frozen earlier in the fall for my birds. Harpo also ate anything else he found around the basement that looked tasty - my straw broom, paper towels, styrofoam peanuts, cat food, etc... The styrofoam peanuts and paper towels constipated him terribly - I could tell because he made the most God-awful grunting and groaning noises I'd ever heard come from the mouth of a living being! It took a day or two, but they did pass, and he was back to his old self. He was an eating machine that NEVER GOT FULL!!! He was an absolute BOTTOMLESS PIT!!! And by the size and smell of his droppings, you would have thought I had a horse or a cow living downstairs... Lets just say, I wore out quite a few mops that winter...
Harpo's enclosure was a former dog run in the basement. The floor in the run was old tile, and the back wall of the run was actually the cinderblock basement wall. The other three sides were made of 4' x 8' sheets of 3/4" finished plywood held together by 4" x 4" studs at the corners - this made the run 8 feet long by 8 feet wide and the walls were 4 feet tall. The front side was equipped with a door that allowed walk-in access to the pen, and a panel made of dog crate wire, which allowed the pen's inhabitant to see outside of the pen into the basement. I hooked up heat lamps and Active UV bulbs and lined the pen with hay, which worked well, but Harpo was not content to stay inside - one morning I had found that he had pushed the dog crate wire so hard that he popped the 3" nails out of the studs like buttons on a shirt! We replaced the wire with more plywood so that he could not see through, but I still had to leave the door open, or he would ram the door continually until he knocked it off its hinges.
Harpo was getting very, very strong and rearranged the basement daily. As he grew, he was able to move bigger and better things with each day. He moved anything from stools to the TV, from my grooming table to my compact refridgerator, from bird cages to the washing machine (which was pretty dented up by the time he got done with it). I was finishing up some paperwork one day at my desk, when my stool began to move - I knew Harpo was walking around by my feet, so I put them on the rungs stool out of his way, but I didn't realize Harpo had wedged himself under the bottom rungs, and was literally carrying me away! Needless to say, by then, I was finding that living with an indoor sulcata was QUITE a challenge!!!
It was a BIG relief when spring came and I could turn Harpo loose outside! Suddenly, all the food bills and clean up I was experiencing just disappeared! I discovered that we had a small wild mulberry tree growing in the yard, and he loved to eat the leaves, in addition to grazing on grasses and weeds in the lawn. He explored every square inch of our 2 acre backyard - our neighbors soon started calling to see if I knew I had a huge turtle roaming around. One neighbor left a hysterical message on our voice mail one day, thinking Harpo was a huge snapping turtle and he would injure our dogs. When everyone finally realized Harpo was friendly, they began to enjoy him as much as we did. He became the hit of neighborhood cookouts and even began to receive visitors! He started greeting my clients at the gate every morning, and they would come back in the afternoon with their kids in tow. Then one day, we saw him digging out on the hill. In the space of a week, he had a 10 foot burrow dug out, and had started on another, which was finished in just a few more days. This was so amazing to watch - his digging power was unreal (luckily, we had no landscaping in the backyard due to the dogs, otherwise, we could have just kissed it good-bye!). This particularly intrigued Wesley, who is a heavy equipment operator and digs holes for a living!
All was going well - Harpo slept in his burrows at night, and came out each morning to bask and graze, and returned to his burrows if the afternoon sun was too hot for him, then he would come back out to eat until dark. If the weather was nice, he would bask and graze all day long, spending the hottest part of the afternoon under a shade tree. He started coming up to the house in the early evening for a drink - while filling up a large bowl for him with the hose, I discovered he enjoyed a daily shower. This became our evening ritual.
Harpo developed a keen interest in anything going on in "his" yard that was out of the ordinary. If Wesley or I was working on something out there, he had to get right in the middle of it, and could really become a pest. Not to mention, he started to suddenly "expose" himself in a show of dominance when he felt it was necessary, and most often, his timing was not appropriate at all. He didn't care who was watching! Women, small children, didn't matter! And this can be shocking in a confusing sort of way if you've never seen it before - just ask my husband!
By late summer/early fall, Harpo was at about 35 pounds. I found that he was especially attracted to bare feet, and painted toenails in particular. I thought this was pretty neat, and sometimes funny, and allowed him to get close and check out whatever it was I was doing in the yard from time to time. That is, until one day when Harpo came up for his evening drink and shower - he got alittle close to my feet when I wasn't looking, and he rammed me, square in my right ankle! It scared me half to death, and when I jumped, I came down in a hole with my left foot and twisted that ankle. I had to crawl up the steps to get away from him - my husband was horrified that I was hurt, but laughed hysterically when I told him what happened! I didn't find it funny at all, because it felt like I had been hit by a 35 pound ROCK!!! After icing my ankles, I was able to walk, and decided it was best NOT to go to the emergency room - they would have dressed me in one of those white coats with long sleeves had I told them I was attacked by a tortoise! Not only was I physically hurt, but my feelings were hurt as well - I became really leary of him, until I learned that ramming can be an act of affection with these tortoises (glad I'm not a female sulcata!). Now we keep our eyes on him at all times and don't allow him to get too close... After being rammed by a 35 pound sulcata, I am quite certain that a 100 pounder is QUITE capable of breaking human bones - even if it IS just a "love tap"!
At some point last summer, I was giving Harpo his evening shower, and discovered that part of one of his dorsal scutes was broken off. He had misshapen scutes from an old injury when he came here tho, so this was not a surprise, but I did make a vet appointntment so we could make sure it was not shell rot of some type. Well, thats when I found out that sulcatas don't ride well in cars! And thats putting it MILDLY!!! I lined a large laundry basket with newspaper, and put Harpo in it, in the back seat of our Suburban on top of an old table cloth. My mom went with me and it was her job to sit in the back with Harpo and make sure he didn't get out of the basket. By the time we got there, it was not a pretty sight - I was frazzled from spending more time watching the rear view mirror than the road, my mom was exhausted from manipulating against Harpo's strength in the basket, and Harpo had defecated all over the basket and shredded the newspaper - and it was only a TEN MINUTE RIDE!. My vet thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread, and all the techs made over him like crazy. Harpo got a clean bill of health - some of the scutes were growing abnormally and the broken one was "pushed" off by the abnormal ones. We were glad there was no infection, but now we had to make it through another ten minute ride home!!! I made my vet swear he'd do housecalls for Harpo if he needed attention ever again...
When the Fall of 2002 rolled around, I dreaded bringing Harpo inside for the winter, but it had to be done. I was determined to be prepared this time! I collected pumpkins after Halloween, cut them up and froze them. I bought tons of butternut squash and froze it too. I stocked up on hay bales and prickly pear cactus. I bought 50 pounds of Mazuri Tortoise Diet to start us off. I sulcata-proofed the basement by moving certain pieces of furniture and appliances close together and up against the walls so that he couldn't get any leverage to move them, and by putting up my brooms and other tasty goodies out of his reach. I even reinforced the latch and hinges on the door to his pen, so that he couldn't sneak up and ram me unexpectedly while I was working.
This worked out well, because we survived the winter of 2002/2003 without a hitch, and Harpo returned to the yard this spring. He's been a happy camper since his "release", spending his days eating and working on his same burrows, which, by now are approximately 16 feet deep. Now, if I could just get him to quit eating mulberries that my dog pulls off the tree... Fat chance - he still eats EVERYTHING that is put in front of him and has put on more than 20 pounds in the year and a half he's been with us! He weighs about 45 pounds as of this writing, and is about 6-7 years old. I shudder to think how much he will weigh in 10 years...
Somewhere along the way, we decided to officially adopt our shelled foster child - in spite of all we'd been through with Harpo, we just couldn't let him go! This has been a true learning experience for both Wesley and me - Wesley learned that I'm absolutely nuts, and I learned that he is EXTREMELY tolerant, and I am very lucky to have him! Plus, we have learned together what incredibly amazing and intelligent animals sulatas really are - but we also learned that while we have Harpo in a domestic situation, he is actually a wild animal that does not belong in captivity. Sulcatas are bought by the thousands in this country as cute little babies in pet stores and from breeders - and then when they outgrow their owners and their surroundings, they are dumped on rescues - just like Harpo. We are very fortunate to be able to provide for him the way we do, and Harpo is lucky that the course of events brought him here - not every sulcata has life so good! While he is very happy here now, we really feel that he would be better off in his native habitat - but since there is no way we can return him to the wild, we will care for him here as best we can for the remainder of his days (or ours, whichever the case may be), and we look forward to learning from him for many years to come...
