h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I spent an hour or two yesterday making a new sleeping house for the tortoise. The house is just a rectangular box with three sides and a roof. She crawls into it at night, and in the morning she turns around and crawls out. The tortoise is not designed for reversing easily, so she much prefers to turn, even if she has to go right up the wall to do so. But she has grown since I built her old house, so she was having great problems turning. The new one is 2cm bigger in all dimensions, so that should make things a bit easier for her.

The tortoise spent the last three months trying to hibernate - she ate very little and if you put her under her heat lamp, she would crawl back into her house.

About two weeks ago, she suddenly became very lively. Yesterday I found she had climbed so high up the side of her cage so that her back legs were about 5cm off the floor of the cage. When I released her from the case, she spent hours tromping around, terrorising the guinea pigs and looking longingly out into the garden. It's still too cold for her to go out - 10 degrees yesterday (50°F for all you Americans).

What interesting adventures. I can imagine her terrorising the guinea pigs.

How warm does it need for her to forage in the garden? We've never kept a tortoise before. Guinea pigs are really frightened by hamsters as well.

It would probably have to be at least 20 degrees (68) for her to go out. It only gets that hot in High Summer here in Ireland.

The guinea pigs don't seem to mind the tortoise too much, but it upsets them when she takes bites out of their fur. She's incredibly strong, so when I put a big basket of logs in front of the guinea pigs' house to keep her out, she just pushed it out of the way. On the other hand, the guinea pigs are very fast, so if they decide to run, she can't catch them. She can't even see which way they went, as she doesn't see fast-moving things well.

Obviously, it's just the slow and complacent guineas that have patchy fur.