Parke, the African desert tortoise, has been rampaging up and down the stock tank that serves as his winter home. It seems like he senses spring in the Alabama air, the season when he gets to wander around the deck. Eventually, he'll move to his summer quarters outside in a pen. That's the thought anyway. No one really knows why Parke is so active. Maybe he wants a mate.
And speaking of lonesome tortoises, "Did I ever tell you about the time. . ."
It was back around 1962, and my father went on an expedition to the Galapagos Islands. Whether it was sponsored by
National Geographic, I'm not really clear (being as I was 11 or something all I remember was that he was gone for a really long time), but he later did a story for the magazine.
Anyway, one day my father and a friend and former student, Robert Silmon Chase, scrambled down into the crater of an extinct volcano on one of the islands. And there they found a solitary tortoise, himself on the brink of extinction. The two men wrestled the 80-pound behemoth out of the caldera, and my father added it to the group of tortoises he would take back to the Bronx Zoo, where he was the curator of reptiles.
Once in the Bronx, however, the tortoises were failing to thrive—not least because, keepers finally discovered, one groundskeeper hated them and would get drunk and bash them in their heads. Still, concern for their preservation made my father return them to a reserve eventually set up in the Galapagos. When last year or so, he read about attempts to breed
Lonesome George, (picture
here) he wondered if maybe that wasn't the same tortoise he and Chase wrestled out of the volcano all those years ago.
