We were rushing out our front gate Saturday morning when our gardener caught us and exclaimed, in his way, petite tortoise!  Whaaa??  Remember my posting Tortoise Ranch where I speculated what might come of our indigenous gramps tortoise meeting the cute, younger girl we introduced?  Well, babies have appeared.  We don’t know exactly how many we have yet.  We think they have just emerged from their egg sacs, still bearing the evidence of their embryonic relationship to that nutritious capsule.

They are so tiny.

Allan can’t stop poking through the mature aloa plant where they have made their habitat trying to assess how many we have.  So far, we have seen only two at any one time and we can’t know yet if we’re seeing the same two or different combinations.  I am hoping it is two.  Two sounds like a responsible number.  Allan is hoping for more like ten.  I’m not sure why.  So here they are:  our first tortoise family photo.

Don’t they look happy?