Turtles in Sardinia
If you are touring Sardinia in summer, you should be prepared for all sorts of animal surprises. You may find a peacefully resting cow blocking your path, a herd of wild boars searching for food at the side of the road, completely unimpressed by your presence, or a fat tortoise using the hot asphalt to warm itself up. In that case, you can consider yourself lucky, because the tortoises in Sardinia are really worth seeing.
Sardinia – A turtle superlative
The island is a natural paradise with many rare plants and animals. I am particularly fond of turtles, and that may be because my first encounter with a turtle in Sardinia was with a real gem. Of course, I spontaneously carried it off the road because I was afraid that a lorry might run it over. From that moment on, my curiosity was piqued: how did turtles get to this island, and such large ones at that? Sardinia is not a branch of the Galapagos Islands! I began to research and came across another Sardinian superlative.
There are four species of turtle in Sardinia, more than anywhere else in Europe. They are the
- Hermann's tortoise (Testudo hermanni)
- Broad-margined tortoise (Testudo marginata)
- Moorish tortoise (Testudo graeca)
- European pond turtle (Emys orbicularis capolongoi)
My personal tortoise mascot
I don't want to try my hand at biology here. I simply like these evolutionarily extremely successful animals because they constantly carry their homes around with them and are always at home wherever they happen to be resting. Isn't it a nice idea to be at home everywhere? That's how I came up with the idea of making the turtle the mascot of Sardafit holiday homes.
Soon afterwards, I would have my very own live turtle mascots. One day, my friend Pino beamed with joy as he presented me with a pair of turtles. He had chosen my garden as their habitat. I wasn't really happy about it, but what could I do? Tino would have been mortally offended if I hadn't accepted his generous gift. So I thanked him effusively, but decided to pamper the turtles for a while and then secretly and quietly release them into the wild. If Pino asked me where they were, what could I do if the armoured reptiles' urge for freedom was so great that it broke down all barriers?
Release into the wild under a full moon
After six weeks had passed, I took action. I grabbed my two protégés on a starry, full moon night and released them into the wild by lifting them over the fieldstone wall surrounding my property and wishing them all the best. Then I went to bed with the certainty that I was a good friend of nature and a true turtle expert. The returned turtles clearly enjoyed their freedom, because they remained missing. Or so it seemed to me.
After a few days, maybe five, I spotted the male. He was back in my garden. Well, I thought, someone must have found you and brought you back. Another two days passed, and then the female was back too. The faithful soul! I couldn't help but feel a certain emotion. To make sense of their miraculous return, I asked around the neighbourhood if anyone had seen them... No! No one had even seen them. So if their return had happened without human help, I concluded sharply, I had not released them properly. So I grabbed the two runaways and took them further away, to the edge of Luttuni. There are no olive and orange groves here, only wilderness and scrubland. Perhaps here, in their natural habitat, they would no longer long to return to my garden...
My Sardinian turtles – a farewell forever?
The timing was good, because I had to return to Germany the next day. When I came back to Sardinia months later, I no longer had the two tortoises ‘on my radar’. So I was all the more surprised when, a few days later, I was woken from my sleep by characteristic loud noises. ‘Wild boars,’ I thought, ‘they're digging up my garden!’ I armed myself with a club to scare away the intruders. When I opened the door and stepped outside, to my surprise, there was no sign of any pigs. Instead, there were two Sardinian tortoises loudly engaged in an adult activity. May tortoises! They had returned home a second time, against all odds!
I decided to grant the turtles lifelong right of residence on my property in Sardinia and named them Ugo Tartarugo and Tina Tartarina.* They thanked me in their own way: about two months after their wild wedding night, eight baby turtles the size of a two-euro coin were crawling around the garden! I resisted the pleas of some holiday home guests who would have liked to take one of the cute babies back to Germany with them. I explained to them that this is strictly prohibited for species protection reasons and can result in severe penalties. Furthermore, these are native Sardinian turtles and they would certainly be happier in their homeland than in a German terrarium.
Later, I poached the offspring. Successfully! And so it has been ever since, with beautiful regularity, year after year. Thanks to my friend Pino, I have become, albeit initially involuntarily, the leader of a turtle breeding programme, so to speak.
With a Sardinian ‘Adiosu’, I bid you farewell for today.
Joachim Waßmann
*Ugo Tartarugo and Tina Tartarina can be found in many variations on our homepage. The surname is derived from the Italian “tartaruga” for ‘turtle’.