Meet the tortoises...

In times of drought & food shortage, these tortoises can bury themselves in the sand for over a year, until it rains again! Listen to commentary by tour manager Richard Segan in the video below:

About 10 years ago, when archaeologist Dave Burney and his wife Lida Pigott Burney began a native plant restoration project on some worn-out farmland on Kauai's Southshore, they had no idea where the project would be taking them. Excavations of a nearby sinkhole revealed fossils of giant flightless ducks and geese, which are now long extinct. Burney interestingly noted that these birds had beaks similar to that of the modern day tortoise, and the type of beaks to which native Hawaiian plants had built up resistance (these same plants were later devastated by the introduction of non-native mammals such as feral goats and pigs).

As part of their “rewilding” project, the Burneys and their volunteers constructed several large enclosures, where they planted many species of rare native plants. They laboriously pulled mass amounts of invasive weeds, with the help of the school children of Kauai and hundreds of volunteers, to help protect their native plantings. Then came the lightbulb moment -  what if giant tortoises could give them a hand, serving as ecological surrogates for the lost birds?