Tortoise Identified

I contacted Dr. Travis LaDuc at the Texas Natural History Collections at the University of Texas at Austin for help with identifying the small tortoise I found last weekend.

He's the Assistant Curator of Herpetology at the Texas Natural Science Center and I thought he might be able to tell what I had. We heard him speak at a Hays County Master Naturalist Chapter meeting earlier in the year.

He was most gracious and responded almost immediately.

He said he doesn't think it's a native and that we don't have any native tortoises in Texas roughly north of the San Antonio Metropolitan area. His best guess is that it's an African spurred tortoise (Geochelone sulcata), which is what I thought it might be too. Here's a photo of a juvenile and it does look similar.

He said that a number of people keep these as pets in their backyards and some of them don't realize what happens when you put a male and female together! Their incubation periods are something like 5 months, so it would be easy to overlook any juveniles.

I've been feeding it grass from the yard and also some carrots and lettuce. It seems to prefer the grass.

It looks like I have a new pet!