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Indoor and Outdoor Turtle Habitats:

Tortoises and turtles should never be kept in glass tanks, unless they are water turtles. Glass tanks have poor ventilation, are difficult to provide ambient temperatures in (hot side/cool side), harbor bacteria, and they do not understand glass, which is why most spend their days pacing and trying to walk through it....this is very stressful for them. If a turtle can see through to the other side, they will keep trying to get to it.

We DO NOT house males and females together here, there are already too many turtles and tortoises in the pet trade needing homes without adding to those numbers.

 

New Project!

After years and years of use, the original wooden tort tables are now falling apart and need to be replaced. As we were commiserating about the cost and effort it would take to rebuild all of these again, we came up with the idea of using Rubbermaid 50 gallon stock tanks instead of wood. They are light weight, roomy (51X30X12), easy to clean and disinfect, and waterproof....and they will last forever! They also cost about $80.00 each so I put a post up on Facebook asking if anyone had any they no longer needed and wow, what a great response we got! Kirsten Whitsell had one delivered to us thru Amazon, Randy Roberts covered 2 more, OurChurch donated their baptismal stock tank to us, and then we got a donation enabling us to buy another one from Northwest Tortoise, and a couple days ago Lee Chris offered us 2 metal stock tanks of roughly the same size. People's generosity has been absolutely amazing, we never dreamed it would all come together like this in such a short amount of time, let alone in just a month! A perfect example of rescues supporting other rescues, and those who cannot rescue, helping those who can with donations. Thank you all so much!

So, the turtle room is currently being completely re-configured. This month we are having to completely re-build the sulcata enclosure as its been slowly destroyed over time. For years it did fine with just a linoleum flooring added to it, but that has been shredded badly at both ends and there is some damage to the wall on one side where Bindi has managed to climb up and scrape against it with her powerful claws. So, we are tearing the old area apart, and rebuilding a new habitat with MUCH higher walls, and a 3-layer floor system, the top section of which will be cement paver bricks, and then substrate will be added over that. A slider-style door will be installed in the front, allowing her to walk in and out of it by herself as its getting increasingly difficult for us to lift her now. Her new area will be 12X6, which is really as large as we can possibly go in that room and still have enough space to squeeze in all the stock tanks that house the smaller turtles and tortoises.

We still need:

  • 42 cement pavers from Home Depot

  • 3 full sheets of 1/2" plywood

 

I will post pictures once that room is all done, right now its a bit chaotic in there with the stock tanks situated in temporary positions. I left the images up below of what the room used to look like, you just have to scroll down a bit  :)

To donate to our current sulcata project, click on the "donate" button at the bottom of this page. Thank you again for your support!

Bindi
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Sulcatas grow to 200 lbs+ and are extremely strong and powerful tortoises. You can see how those easily claws chewed up her current habitat, she shredded her linoleum flooring like it was nothing....thus the need for a new and sulcata-proof habitat!

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Two of the new stock tanks.

This is what our turtle room used to look like, with all the wooden tort tables we built:

Our turtle room.

This is the indoor pond we built for the red earred slider, Miss Lucy

Our Ornate table.

Lucy is very fond of playing in the spray of water fountains!

Notice at the end we have a much deeper area designated for the females to lay their eggs. Even without a male, females will still lay eggs.

Outdoor Habitats:

This is where we keep just one small 3 toed male turtle.

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This is the outdoor pond being set up for Lucy.

This is the new outdoor area for the 3 ornate female turtles. I will be adding more plants this season. The site barrier had not been installed when these 2 images were taken. Site barriers are really important to have in turtle enclosures. We make ours about 18 inches high from the ground up all the way around the interior sides.

Below are a few shots of the shelled wonders enjoying their time outside. We take them all out in the morning and bring them all back in around dusk during the warmer months.

All the enclosures are extremely secure with galvanized fencing underneath the substrate to prevent them from tunneling out and chicken wire over the top to keep birds or other predators from climbing in.

This is Bindi, she has a designated are of our back yard to roam in. She LOVES playing in the sprinkler on hot days! Bindi is a sulcata tortoise and will be around 200lbs full grown.

We built a ramp onto the back door so Bindi can let herself in and out of the house. She is a bit heavy to carry these days!

If the donate button below gives you any problems, you can still send a donation  through PayPal by using our email address: sshalimar16@msn.com

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