Saturday, May 05, 2007

More Interesting Stuff

Things here are pretty much the same. Although my partner got a better job working for the Nevada Department of Wildlife so his last day will be on the 17th. I don't know what that means for me but oh well something will be figured out. I thought I would show you guys what my week was like when I was doing radio telemetry. All these pictures were taken that week and all but one of the tortoises have radio transmitters on them.

This guy is a good example of a male. You can see the long gular horn under his chin that the males use in combat to flip each other over. Also he has enlarged glands on his chin. I got along great with this guy, I shared some of my orange with him on the last day and according to the team that did the telemetry the next week he actually ate it.

I can't remember if this was a male or female but I thought it would be interesting to show you the shell. This poor tortoise was in a fire and that is why it's shell has scutes missing and is all discolored and scarred. This is not good for it at all, because of the coloring this one was very easy to spot even without the transmitter.

We had a suspicion that these two were mating but aren't for sure since every time we came around they were in the position they are in the picture but they were like that all day. I'm pretty sure they knew we were coming long before we spotted them and acted like nothing was going on. However, at the end of the day the smaller one with the transmitter on was walking away from the other so whatever they were doing all day was apparently done. In this picture you can really see the difference between the males and females. The male is the larger one on the right, look for the longer horn and the enlarged glands

This one I just had to throw in because it reminded me of a Dr. Seuss plant.