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Wildfire Damages Important Sonoran Tortoise Migration Path In Scottsdale

SCOTTSDALE, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) — A nature preserve left burned and charred north of Scottsdale is now in desperate need of restoration. "We've pretty much put the area on red alert kind of watch," said Melanie Tluczek, the director of science and education at the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy. The Diamond Fire consumed around 2,000 acres earlier this summer, with nearly 300 of that in the preserve at the conservancy.

The area is called the Gooseneck. It is a narrow strip of land that connects the northern and southern parts of the preserve. Animals like the Sonoran Desert tortoise have no choice but to travel through it to reach different parts of their habitat. "That was a sizable amount of that land was impacted," said Tluczek.

Typically preserves tend to have little to no human interaction but they will need to go in and restore it to help the tortoises and prevent something else from moving in. "Now that it's burnt, it's really susceptible to these invasive plants to grow. That puts the desert tortoises at risk because of those invasive plants. Then they lose a really big chunk of their food source and then they really have nowhere else to migrate through there."

Weeks after the Diamond Fire was put out, a neighborhood near Scottsdale is starting to clean up and getting water has been an issue.

The McDowell Sonoran Conservancy said they are working on plans to reseed the area that was lost. "That is the name of the game. It's getting native seeds and native plants out there and giving them the upper hand so they can compete with invasive plants," said Tluczek.

While they work, they are asking hikers for help. They want people to stay on the trails and not go out and explore those damaged areas. "I know that sounds like an incredibly simple thing but it's so important because those areas are so fragile after a burn. The soil is fragile. It's very easy to transport inevasible species on your boot, things like that," said Tluczek.

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A Tortoise: It Does Not Live Inside A Shell, It Is A Shell

It is important to remember that the tortoise does not live inside a shell, it is a shell: tortoises walk like they do because the sockets of their hip and shoulder bones are inside their shells, right at the top. They move like we would if we were cars with arms and legs: slowly, and not like cars at all.

Their shells are part of them in another way, too: they have nerve endings, which is why tortoises enjoy being cleaned with toothbrushes or showers:

It is also why it feels particularly good to touch a tortoise's shell. It is like touching someone's hand through glass or putting your fingertip on a static electricity ball. Cooler than you think it will be, and smoother, but not too smooth – not too reptilian and very much alive.

Some tortoises, of course, live for a very long time. Harriet, a Galápagos tortoise, lived for so long that she was rumoured (incorrectly, but conceivably) to have met both Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin. She died because she kept hearing Americans referring to her as a "turtle".

I was in Greece recently so, naturally, a single image kept knocking on my shell: the ending of Rachel Cusk's Kudos. The narrator is swimming in the sea. A man walks to the water. "He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more," Cusk writes. "The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes and I waited for him to stop."

I was staying at a small hotel on the island of Agistri with my family (early coins, made on the Aegina, the larger island next door, bore the image of a tortoise). One morning, a manager at the hotel called my small daughter over to see something: it was a tortoise. The tortoise was named Platonus, she said: Plato, but a woman. Most people thought that the tortoise was male, but she liked to think it was female. She would only be out here for a few more weeks, and then she would crawl under the small shed that served as an office, burrow herself into the cool earth and stay there for the rest of summer. This is called Aestivation, rather than hibernation – many tortoises hibernate instead, in winter. (You can also hibernate a tortoise in a fridge).

When it was cool enough to come out, Platonus would emerge, heroically, and "make urine" for a very long time, the manager said. Then she would be given as much lettuce as she wanted. What did lady Plato think about while she was in there? You could imagine her, holding forth while expelling a small yet significant stream, telling you what she had realised, that, "The measure of a woman is what she does with her power", or that "No one is more hated than she who speaks the truth" or, "It is time we put a stop to Americans referring to tortoises as turtles once and for all." You could imagine her as lady Saul Bellow, "an omniscient tortoise", as described by lady Martin Amis.

I have been thinking about Platonus ever since, but especially last week, worrying about her and whether it will still be cool enough in her burrow and hoping she has had enough to drink.

Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024

Have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Email helen.Sullivan@theguardian.Com

The Pet I'll Never Forget: Julius The Tortoise Won Our Hearts – Then Died Of A Broken Penis

The Belgian pet shop where we found Julius wasn't a good place. You could get anything: puppies, wallabies – owls, even. It smelled wrong in there: of excrement and fear. Your vestigial hackles were raised.

I knew we shouldn't buy a pet from that shop. It was no better than buying a pangolin from a Vietnamese market to "save" it, really, but walking around, between sphynx cats, chinchillas, geckos and chameleons, we spotted a large tortoise in a glass case that was far too small. My husband and I had had tortoises as kids and loved the idea of them. Plus, he was so beautiful: big – probably 40cm long – with a yellow and black head and ruby-red spots, like jewels, on his legs. Impassively munching a stalk, he seemed like a grounded dragon, stuck in a box in a Brussels suburb. We exchanged a quick glance, then called over one of the sales assistants.

He was called John Paul II, the chap said, because he looked a bit like Karol Wojtyła. He cost us €500 – a fortune – and the only paperwork he came with was a receipt that read "Miscellaneous". We travelled home, box on my knees, in a state of disbelief.

We renamed him Julius after Julius II; if he had to be a pope, I thought he should be a more extravagant Renaissance one. Red-footed tortoises are tropical, so they don't hibernate, we discovered, as we rapidly became red-foot experts, sourcing heat lamps and studying his diet, grating cuttlefish bone over his greens and fruit, and offering him snails.

Julius spent summers in our small back garden and roamed the house in winter – all the vivariums we could find were far too small for him. He was a winning presence: curious and fearless, often getting improbably lost for such a big creature. We would sometimes find him dozing in a cupboard, like an exceptionally decorative rock. When anyone sat in the garden, he would lumber over to investigate. Reptile brains are supposed to be primitive, so I suppose it wasn't affection, but something drew him to us. In return, we adored our mysterious housemate.

It would be nice if this were a happy-ending story; it isn't. A few years later, we came home to the horrifying sight of Julius with his large penis sticking out. We took him to the vet, who was baffled, describing it as "an erection gone wrong", but also excited. Manual reinsertion failed, so he decided to amputate: a first for Belgium. We waited anxiously for a call, which eventually came: Julius had survived. He came home to recuperate, but he wasn't his old self: he seemed listless, disinclined to rumble around the house, and off his greens. My husband was travelling, so it fell to me to rub iodine on the amputation stump, upside down over the sink, grimly massaging as he struggled to escape. He continued to decline and a few weeks later he died, probably of a post-operative infection, or shock.

I used to tell this story for laughs – the receipt, John Paul II, the penis stump! – but it doesn't feel so funny now. Julius's death was the moment that I let go of my Gerald Durrell fantasy of having a house full of exotic creatures and started to think that mostly those kinds of animals have no place with us and keeping them isn't a kindness. We still have tortoises – little European ones, who happily stomp around the garden and hibernate all winter.

I think of Julius like one of my son's needy, always-ailing tropical houseplants: beautiful, extraordinary, wondrous, but not really meant for our grey, rainy lands.

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