Something we should consider adding to our Spa menu: a relaxing mud bath for Brutus!

A definite romance going on in those two! It seems like ages when we shipped this female and male in from Anonyme Island, and released them after 3 weeks of quarantine, at the western side of the island. How did that story-line go? Yup, the story line “and they lived happily ever after” sure seems to be applicable !

This giant tortoise chose a surprising place to nest: on the gravel-covered round-about at our staff canteen, this female ignored all music, barbeque smells and intrigued passers-by, and kept digging a nest. So we dismantled our barbeque drums and placed them around her to block off traffic. Clutches of giant tortoises normally contain 10 to 15, sometimes even 20 eggs. This female, however, only laid 1 infertile egg. Oh well, at least she tried…

No respect for our nursery work! That’s what first sprang to mind when we found male tortoise number 5 pedantically sitting right on top of about 20 carefully nurtured native seedlings. It took a couple of mangoes to lurk him off our “endemic forest in the make” and a frantic call to the landscape manager, where after we decided to forgive him because that scaly head does not offer space for a lot of brain anyway