Feeding & Nutrition

The first warm week of April is when I start checking the box in the shed. Herman is a Hermann's tortoise, somewhere past thirty, and he spends the cold months buried in a wooden crate of straw and soil I keep in the coldest corner I can find. He doesn't move. You can pick him up and he goes limp, which the first year nearly stopped my heart until the vet laughed and said that's rather the point.

When he wakes, it isn't dramatic. A faint shift, a leg uncurling, then the slow blink of an animal that has been nowhere for four months. The mistake I made that first spring was to feed him like nothing had happened. I offered a pile of food the moment his eyes opened, proud of myself, certain I was doing the right thing. The vet, when I mentioned it, was gentle but firm. You don't wake a sleeping thing and hand it a feast. The gut has been shut down. You warm him, you bath him, you wait.

So now the routine is this. I bring him in, set him under a lamp that isn't too close, and offer water in a shallow dish he can't tip over. He soaks. Tortoises dehydrate in hibernation and the soak is the first real meal, even if it's only water. A day later, maybe two, I offer a leaf. Just one. A dandelion, a bit of sow thistle from the veg patch, something soft and familiar, not the crunchy shop stuff I used to buy.

People think tortoises are easy. Leave them in a box, forget them, they'll be fine. They're not easy, they're just quiet about their needs. After hibernation the body is running on nothing, and the difference between a good wake and a vet emergency is a week of patience most of us don't have. I've learned to weigh him on the kitchen scales every few days. If the number keeps dropping past the first week, that's the signal something's wrong, not just the long sleep wearing off.

The feeding itself became a small daily ritual. Herman has opinions. He will walk past a pristine pile of rocket and head straight for the weed I didn't plant, the one with the jagged leaf growing through the patio crack. I've stopped fighting it. A tortoise that's been asleep since November isn't going to suddenly respect my meal plan. I give him variety and let him choose, which turns out to be exactly what the books say and exactly what I ignored for years.

What surprised me was how much he ate once he was properly awake, and how quickly the warmth changed him from a statue back into a creature with somewhere to be. Within a fortnight he's pacing the enclosure, digging at the corners, chasing the snail he shares the run with. The sleeping thing is gone. In its place is a stubborn old animal who remembers exactly where the sunny brick is and resents sharing it.

I keep a note on the fridge now, the date he went down and the date he came up, because the years blur and Herman isn't going to tell me. Thirty years of Aprils, and I still forget, every single time, how to bring him back. Then I remember: warm, water, wait, leaf. Not a feast. Not yet.

The enclosure itself took a summer to get right. Herman needed sun and shade and a wall he couldn't climb, which for a tortoise means a wall taller than his shell is long, because they are escape artists in slow motion, and a thirty-year-old tortoise with a plan is a patient, patient adversary. I built it, he tested it, and for three years running he found the one gap I'd missed, usually at dawn, usually into the neighbour's rhubarb.

I take him to the vet every other spring for a weigh-in and a once-over, and the relief of having a professional confirm he is merely old and not dying is enormous every single time. She checks his shell for soft spots, his eyes for the cloudiness that means trouble, and she asks the same question, is he eating, and I tell her about the weeds and the waiting and she nods like this is the most normal thing in the world.

People ask if it's worth the fuss for one small reptile who sleeps half the year and ignores you the other half. I think of the thirty years, the box in the shed, the slow blink in April, and I don't bother answering. A creature that has outlived two of my cars and most of my houseplants has earned the occasional soak and a leaf picked by hand. The sleeping thing, when it wakes, remembers the sunny brick, and so do I.

One thing I wish someone had told me at the start: the year he doesn't wake on schedule is the year you panic, and panicking is useless. I now give him a fortnight past the usual date before I so much as lift the crate lid, because hurrying a tortoise is the one thing guaranteed not to work, and the worry, I've learned, is mine, not his.