New Tortoise!
This happened back in June, but I haven't gotten around to telling pretty much anyone about our tortoise. We got a desert tortoise last year and named him Spartacus. He flipped himself over a few times last year. We turned him back over as soon as we found him, but we didn't know if he'd suffered any damage from being upside down in the hot sun. But this Spring when he came out of hibernation, he had morphed into "Retardacus." He walked funny and kept flipping over onto his back for no apparent reason. We called AZ Fish and Game (from whom we adopted him) and they said he had probably suffered a heat stroke. Finally, he must have starved to death while Ryan was in the Grand Canyon because he couldn't walk to the grass to eat.
Ryan noticed that he'd been over in the sandy area for a while, and thought he'd move him to the grass so he could eat, but then he noticed that there were ants crawling all over Retardacus.
We called Arizona Fish and Game and they said to bring in the body and we could get a new one if we wanted. So we told Jared that Retardacus was sick and we were taking him back and getting a new one. We hope he doesn't apply that logic to his baby brother some day :)
We picked out the only one we could find (the rest were hiding from the heat in their pens) and brought him home. He seems more normal than our first one ever was. But just like the first one, as soon as we put him down, he went for my toes. They must think that my colorful toenails are flower petals. It was only exacerbated by the fact that my sandals have fake flowers on them!
So now we have a healthy desert tortoise running around the back yard. They're actually quite a lot faster than you'd think. Jared wanted to name him Spartacus again, so now Ryan and I are trying to figure out how to designate that it's not the original Spartacus. I think since we had pretty much changed the other one's name to Retardacus, the new one can just be Spartacus. Ryan insists on calling him "New Spartacus." Whatever.
While we were there, we saw some really cool animals. There were bobcats, owls, some other desert animals I couldn't identify positively, a giant Golden Eagle, and even a BALD EAGLE!

Look for more pictures in our Photo Album.