Friday’s impromptu tortoise rescue

I was working away at my laptop Friday afternoon when the front doorbell rang. It was a guy asking me if I was missing a tortoise. I was not, but I was curious, so I went to go see what was up. The situation in a nutshell: a decent-sized male Sulcata or African spurred tortoise, Centrochelys sulcata, had gotten loose from somewhere. The guy who rang my doorbell had seen it crossing the street in front of my house, which is reasonably busy in the late afternoon on a Friday. He didn’t want the tortoise to get hurt, so he pulled over and parked his car, moved the tortoise to a sidewalk, and called Animal Control. Then he flagged down another guy who was out on a walk to mind the tortoise while he rang doorbells to see if anyone in the nearby houses was missing a tortoise. So far so good. Except that by the time I got across the street to take a look, the random passerby tortoise-minder let the tortoise crawl under a minivan in someone’s driveway. Oops. Don’t worry, the tortoise was fine.…