Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I just started taking my russian tortoises outdoors for some fresh air, some sunshine, and some nice grazing oppurtunities. I have one older tortoise who is roughly 6" shell length and heavy, and I don't really worry about her too much when she's out running around, as long as she stays close enough that I can easily see her. However, me other russian tort is only about 3.5" shell length, and I'm very nervous bringing him outside. I stay close to him (never more than 10' away, except when I have to quickly retreive the older tortoise). I'm just worried that even with me out there, a hungry hawk might swoop down and carry him away. could that actually happen, and how could I prevent against it?

My other question is, how do I keep the tortoise away from toxic plants in my yard? Will they know what is edible and what is not edible? I thought I read that somewhere, but I'm not sure how true it is. I don't know of anything in particular that is in my yard that is toxic, but I'm just worried that the little pigs might eat something that could harm them. I'm also worried about my neibors and whether or not they treat their yards with harmful chemicals. the tortoises never go into the neibor's yards, but I'm still nervous about that.

Any info is much appreciated. I don't intend to keep them outdoors unsupervised, but I'd like to build a pen for them to wander around in so that I could let them out and watch them soak up some rays.

Hawks and eagles aren't likely to be a problem if you are out there with your torts. They are more frightened of you than they are hungry for torts.

Ask your neighbors when and with what they treat their yards politely. My neighbors know about my critters and let me know before they have anyone come out so I will know too. I am on good terms with them. As I have a large yard I only worry about the 4 feet or so near the fence. If you build an outdoor enclosure for your torts, make sure you have a good sturdy top, that locks, to prevent racoons and such from raiding it. I'd worry more about them than hawks as raccons they come at night.

If you are interested in buildign your own pen post a query asking for pictures of other peoples setups and take notes as to what would be best for your situation. I have seen some marvelous setup pics here over the years.

As for losing the babies in the yard while you are there, take some double sided carpet tape, buy at hardware store, and a set of kids suction cup arrows. Place a square of double sided tape to the suction end of the arrow and press firmly on top of the carapace. Put a red piece of fabric or paper at the other end and you now have a tort with a red flag. Very easy to keep track of in the yard and comes off with out hurting the shell. If you have a lot of red flowers in the yard try a yellow flag.

You could also use a kiddy pool as recreation area for your torts so that you will know where they will be and won't have to worry about the plant/ insecticide issue at all.

Hope this helps.

I'm not sure if any of my neighbors use any sort of chemicals in their yards, so I'll have to ask them, but if they did, is there a chance of it spreading into my yard, or just maybe the outer edges (like you said, 4 feet from the fence)?

The arrow thing is a great idea too. I'll have to try that one out. For now it doesn't seem to be much of a problem though, because the poor little guy is still a little frightened of being outside, and doesn't stray from us, so we can usually see him easily. But if he starts venturing out, then we'll have to try something like that. The larger russian is pretty easy to keep track of, but she is a real escape artist. She's made it under the fence twice so far, so we're going to try to find some sort of garden fencing (usually decorative and made out of wire) so we can put up a huge pen for her in the backyard so she can't get away from us. We found some really nice fencing that would work great for the larger tort, but the little guy would be able to get out, so we're going to keep looking for something smaller.

But we do supervise them closely. If it's just me out in the back yard with them, I don't let the smaller one get any further than 5-10 feet from me, and I don't let the larger one get out of sight.

Since summers aren't very long here, we're thinking about putting together a large tortoise table in our basement for some social time for the torts in the winter. It gets too cold and humid there at night to be able to keep them there, and the cat might bother them, so they'll have to stay in their regular enclosures most of the time, but we think it might be a good way to get some exercise, and we might outfit it with a powersun bulb or two for some extra UV in the winter time.

For that I think we're going to use this 8'x3' table I have as a base, but we also have a 6'x3' table that's close to the same height, and I think it would be cool to put them up next to each other and make something that's like 6' wide and 6-8' long.

Just some thoughts.