Saving the Giant Tortoises

While we were in Rodrigues Island last weekend, we made a visit to the Francois Leguat Giant Tortoise Preserve.  This is a truly special place.  When Leguat, one of the first explorers of Rodrigues Island first set foot on the island, he described the scene as one where there were so many giant tortoises that one could walk on their backs for kilometers and never step on the ground.  These days, they are not nearly so numerous, but the tortoise preserve is doing a tremendous job of bringing back a nearly extinct animal to abundance.  "It was Charles Darwin himself who set all this in motion. He visited Mauritius on the return voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle in 1836, where he heard about the extinct giant tortoises. Many years later, he suggested that the best way to see that the thousands of giant tortoises then living on uninhabited Aldabra Island (their last stand in the Indian Ocean region) didn’t go the way of the extinct giant tortoises of Madagascar, the Mascarenes, and the Seychelles, was to move some to these other islands and establish populations, and that was done on Mauritius." David A. Burney, Madagascar Conservation & Development.  Aside from being magnificent animals and just as cute as a wrinkly old beast can be, they liked being rubbed on their shells and under their necks.    Shelly and I were thrilled to see the hundreds of Aldabra and other tortoises in a beautiful canyon being scientifically repopulated.  It gave us hope that we might preserve this beautiful creature after all.