Sheldon

Sheldon is our yellow-bellied slider. He came to us in March 2017 as a tiny baby. Someone found him wondering quite far from water. He was so small it looked like he had just been born. While he should have been taken to a pond and left in nature as intended since he was technically a wild animal, Skye's rescue instincts kicked in, and she worried he couldn’t survive on his own.

Sheldon has always been special. He’s not great at catching food, so Skye hand-fed him for a long time, which makes us wonder how well he sees. He definitely wouldn’t survive in the wild now. So he lives in a large tank in the dining room with some rescued fish, but the fish actually scare him! We have big plans to create a predator-proof habitat for him in the garden with a pond and real sunshine, but we haven’t had the extra hands to build it yet.

Ironically, Sheldon is actually a girl! However we named him Sheldon and thought of him as male before actually determining that he was in fact a she. So we continue to call him he out of habit. I don’t think he minds.