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In honor of the 11th annual World Turtle Day, sponsored by American Tortoise Rescue, I'm sharing a guest post from my personal blog written by my childhood friend, Kathleen Teager, back in 2008. Her story of Stanley the Tortoise not only tells the tale of an extraordinary creature but - thanks to Google - it resulted saving the life of another beloved tortoise. Enjoy!:
“Is he out yet?”
Every spring for the past four decades, I’ve asked my parents this same question. The emergence of our tortoise from his winter hibernation is an annual family event. About a month ago, Stan decided it was time to walk out of the garage into the spring sunshine. According to my mom, this year he came out, loped around for a bit, then decided no, not yet, a bit more of a winter nap was in order. You know how great it feels to be cozy in your bed on a cold winter morning? How great that must be to stay asleep as long as you want, and when your body tells you it’s time to get up, that’s when you do it. No alarm clocks, no schedules, just nature’s sweet awakening.
Stanley the Desert Tortoise, a.k.a. Stan the Man, is remarkable in that he is approximately 125 years old. About 30 years ago he was examined by a reptilian expert, known simply as the Turtle Lady, in Long Beach, CA who deemed him close to one hundred. That makes him born around 1883, when Chester A. Arthur (below) was president (dude at right). The average tortoise lives 80-100 years. What’s even more interesting is that he has survived multiple brushes with death, making him as tough as his hard, gray shell.
Stan was brought (illegally) from the Mojave Desert by my Dad’s friend, Jack, in the early 1960s, meaning the majority of his life was spent like a normal tortoise, in the hot sun, digging sand tunnels and eating desert plants. Jack gave Stanley to my parents in 1967, which marked the beginning of his life in Long Beach, California. The weather was dramatically cooler and wetter, but Stan adapted fine. His diet changed to rose petals, hibiscus flowers, and star jasmine plants, along with his favorite, Santa Rosa plums.
My childhood memories of Stan are of him walking around our backyard, with a swipe of ripe plum across his toothless mouth. He never bit anyone, and seemed to enjoy it if someone scratched the back of his shell (although emotion never registered on his face, so I’m not sure). If you picked him up, he would surely hiss. He was a favorite show-and-tell item at my elementary school. I brought him to my second grade classroom, and he ceremoniously took a poop on the linoleum, much to the delight and squealing of my classmates.
His first brush with death was a near drowning, sometime in the 70’s. One behavior he brought with him from the desert was tunneling. Stan had dug himself quite an impressive hole, and was probably bent on settling himself for a long winter nap inside when a rainstorm began filling his hole with mud. Luckily my brother, John, and my dad, pulled a muddy - and probably pretty pissed off - Stan from the hole and put him in the garage. Gradually his tunneling behavior stopped, and the garage became his home every winter.
In the late 80’s, Stan’s peripheral vision started to diminish. He was 100 by then, so what do you expect from an old man? One of his routines was to stroll the perimeter of my parents’ swimming pool. One day, he got too close to the edge and fell in. My dad just happened to notice a dark, gray, boulder-like figure in the center of the 9-foot deep end, dove in, and pulled Stanley to the surface. I was home from college at the time and helped revive a cold, wet, foamy-mouthed tortoise back to life.
My dad and I turned him upside down, causing great amounts of pool water to come out of his body and onto the deck. He looked terrible, his eyes were glazed over and he was not moving. I actually gave him CPR, breathing my warm breath into his wrinkled, scaly mouth. Stan then spent the next ten days in an incubator, recovering from pneumonia at an exotic pet vet’s office.
