Home Sweet Hole

People say that a turtle's home is his shell, but that's not entirely true. And technically, this isn't a turtle, but a tortoise. A gopher tortoise to be exact, and he lives in a hole in the ground. I stumbled (almost literally) across this guy on Sunday while at an Earth Day celebration. I thought he was a stuffed display at first, but then he slid a few inches into his hole as I got closer, so I knew he was the real thing. These guys used to live all over the place here in Florida, but habitat loss has decimated their population, and they are now protected. We used to play with them as kids, but I suspect that's against the law now.