Reggie's farewell to Arnside

Back blipped on 17 April 2023


Here is the long promised update on Reggie.  We have been waiting for news of his emergence from hibernation before posting this photo that I took of him last year, the day before he relocated to his new home in Ulverston.  As I write this, I am relieved to say that yesterday we heard that he has emerged muddy and blinking into a new year after 7 months plus underground.  I suspect he will have unearthed himself earlier, as his his usual way, on the first day of warm Spring sunshine, but will have been lying low in deep cover.  I didn't dare post this without having heard the good news, just in case.

Throughout the first half of 2022 when we knew we would be leaving Cumbria and moving to our new home in East Yorkshire, the most pressing issue for us was what to do about Reggie.  We knew the garden at our new house would not be suitable for a free-living tortoise with the escapology skills of Houdini.  In our old garden we had unscalable walls on three sides, and had constructed a wooden palisade on the fourth side to contain him.  Even then we had several incidents when he managed to breach the defences and it was good luck that he was found by us or our neighbours before he made his getaway.  Here we have a small garden with a hedge boundary and we lack the diversity of food plants that we had in Arnside.  Hence, we knew we had to find a new home for him, and that we would need to do that before he went into hibernation in September, or else we might have to leave the house and garden in January with him still underground. 

After a lot of enquiries about potential new homes had proved fruitless, we had a visit from Caroline's friend from Ulverston who came with her husband J to look at our piano which was also looking for a new home.  And while the piano didn't meet their requirements, unexpectedly J was very taken with Reggie and the idea was born that he might move to live with them.  They have a walled garden with dense flower beds and plenty of variety of food plants.  We then checked out their garden, identified a few risk factors that could be easily addressed, and it was agreed that he would move in the Summer in good time for him to settle in before he dug in for his annual hibernation.  Hence this photo was taken on the last day in our garden before he was collected and taken to his new home.  He settled well, became very amorous with a small bag of stones, and clearly didn't miss his Arnside keepers at all.  But the big question was always whether he would find himself a suitable hibernaculum, and would he come through another winter.  Well, we shouldn't have doubted his tenacity and powers of survival.

All is well.

And there is an extra of Gus, enjoying that same Summer's day in the old garden.  For an old dog he looks well, if a little tired  Two months on my heart still aches painfully from losing him.  We had discussed when we moved  that if we could take just one thing with us, it would have been Gus.  Looking back it seems miraculous that he hung on to life long enough to make the move with us, and now we have the comfort of him resting in his special place close by.