My Take
DiVoran Lites
Oh, armored one with your:
Pointed beak,
Big Fat Tongue,
Long sharp claws,
Lumbering gait,
Tunnel master,
I just want to talk to you.
Don’t disappear
Into your shell.
Into your burrow.
Please come out
I won’t harm you,
Or the secret life you live.
Slow and so free.
I enjoyed the tortoise story so much, I wanted to go ahead and post the next installment. Plus, those days with the grandchildren are great fun but sure do a number on my energy and creativity, so I am happy to take a pass on my blog post this week.
My Take
DiVoran Lites
Nature specials on T. V. are great, but most of all, I love to observe nature in action for myself. I had what I thought was a real adventure with two gopher tortoises the other day. I saw two gopher tortoises in the same few feet of trail and figured they had to be together. I thought maybe the dinner-plate sized one was the mother and the salad-plate sized one who was about to wander into my subdivision and get hurt was her son. I picked up the small one and took it over to the big one.
Later I asked my Biologist son who has studied gopher tortoises since he was at the University of Central Florida if I’d done the right thing. Seems I was all wet in every department, but he graciously gave me the real scoop on the life and times of gopher tortoises.
“The salad plate size is about eight years old and close to the maturity necessary for mating. The bigger one would be from twenty-five to fifty years old.”
The minute I set the small one down the big one started bobbing his head.
“The scientists call it head-bobbing.”
Was it gopher tortoise communication?
“Yes. They recognized that they were of the same species though their ages were vastly different.”
Was it threatening?
“It would be easier to guess about that if we knew the sexes of the two animals. “If it’s a boy the shell is indented at the back, but if it’s a girl the shell is flat.”
I didn’t think to check that.
The head bobbing could have signaled an interest in mating or it could have signaled a territorial dispute. In the field, I’ve seen two tortoises sitting on the apron and bobbing heads for hours.”
The apron?
The sand hill at the opening of the burrow is called the apron. It’s where the mother tortoise lays her clutch of eggs so the sun can warm them and the sand can keep them cool on hot days.
I asked if mother tortoises look after babies when they hatch.
“No, when the baby tortoises hatch they’re soft and about the size of a silver dollar. That’s when they become food for dogs, feral cats, raccoons and birds of prey.
At about six months of age, gopher tortoises dig three to five burrows, over a two-acre area and roam from one to another on a rotating basis.
I didn’t want the little one to go into the subdivision.
“That’s right,” says B. “The biggest danger to any tortoise is a dog. They crush them with their teeth, and bite off any parts they can get to.
So the big one wasn’t the small one’s mother and even if she had been she wouldn’t have cared what happened to him.
That’s right, but hey, Mom, you have a great imagination, and in reality you may have saved the smaller tortoises life, so yes, you did the right thing, you just went the long way around to do it.
I guess it’s great to have a good imagination, but I need to keep in mind that there are things I can’t figure out because I don’t have all the facts.
In other words, we don’t know everything, and having a good imagination doesn’t always help.
I Corinthians 8:3 We never really know enough until we know that God knows it all.
Old Things R New 