In February 2021, many of us faced unprecedented weather for the area in the form of a prolonged period of freezing temperatures. Before you decide to provide a home for a tortoise, make sure that you have both the financial and the physical resources and physical strength/fitness to be prepared for the unexpected. Once things freeze in Texas, it’s already too late to go buy a heater or generator. We recommend having a generator on hand to keep your tortoise’s house warm in case of long periods without electricity. You need to be physically capable of moving your tortoise to safety - either to their heated house or into your home with you if need be. We used every available container to keep tortoises gathered around our fireplace during snowpocolypse, except for one 80 lb tortoise that was outside in an insulated house with a heat mat connected to a generator. We used a bluetooth thermometer with an alarm on it to tell us when the temperature in the tortoise house dropped to 60, and then we’d crank on the generator to get it warmed up. We couldn’t leave for gas because the roads were impassable and most places were closed anyway, so we would leave the generator on long enough to bring the tortoise’s house up to about 80 degrees and then shut it off until the alarm went off again (about every 2 hours).

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          When temperatures are going to be too low for days at a time, we use plywood and bricks to block the doors to the tortoise houses so they can’t come out and get chilled and become stranded (cold-stunned, essentially) outside of their heated house. Generally, if the forecast is below 55 for several days in a row, we leave the tortoises “locked in” to their heated houses until the temperatures come back up. Once it warms and the sun comes out, we remove the blockade from the door and allow them to come out on their own. In our area they generally are not blocked in for longer than 2 – 3 days at one time, and even that happens very rarely.