Favoritos de asleepias

I’ve been exploring this area whenever I can this summer and I’ve been seeing tortoises in the washes/up against hillsides, and then I’ve been seeing carcasses out in the flat open desert. Well carcasses in the hills too but the flat area of the desert just looks bad habitat wise. I’ve seen 3 different alive tortoises this week and then about 8 ish carcasses in this area. Well today I saw this living tortoise in the open, flat desert, where the vegetation took is worse and drier than the hills and washes. (Also an OHV area where people are riding all over the place so it’s pretty remarkable where this tortoise lives!) I noticed the burrow first, saw lots of poop outside it. I got down on my knees to peak in and the tortoise could hear me or see me I guess and came out of its burrow to see who I was. How cool is that. I sat in the sun, blocking the light so it wouldn’t blind or heat the tortoise too much up, giving it shade while it hung out outside the burrow, and I also had a plastic container lid that I poured water onto. It wasn’t interested in it. The ground is wet from the water. It had very long back nails, so maybe female. There was a slight chance of rain today but I don’t think it rained at all. Just got cloudy. Still a chance of rain tonight and tmw.