Columnist Susan Snyder: The return of the tortoises

Sunday, July 16, 2000 | 10:24 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

Jean Magdall's "children" are back.

About three weeks ago two of Magdall's four desert tortoises disappeared from the Las Vegas woman's yard. Her son, Las Vegas dentist Boyd Magdall, owned them for more than 30 years. She adopted them after he died in a highway accident March 19.

Magdall and her husband, Gene Hepker, figured the pair were stolen. They handed out fliers, and their story was featured here a week ago.

Success came earlier this week when a neighbor told Magdall the animals had been taken in by Clark County's Desert Tortoise Mitigation Service. Someone spotted them wandering down the street.

The service returned the tortoises Wednesday.

"Here's your big guy," tortoise rescuer Ginny Bulleman said as she lifted one of the beasts out of a plastic carrier and placed it at Magdall's feet.

He -- and it is a he -- lifted his head and meandered into the sandy habitat from where he had disappeared. A red dot on the shell was the microchip that forever marks him as Magdall's.

"Oh, there you are! Now you're home. You're a good fella after all," Magdall said happily. "Isn't he just something else?"

Bulleman returned a couple of minutes later with the plastic bin that contained the other tortoise -- a female that had laid three eggs in Magdall's yard before she, too, vanished.

While Magdall signed release forms, Bulleman scanned the yard. A concrete wall topped with an iron fence enclosed its three exposed sides. Steel mesh covered the concrete lattice design at one end. She said she couldn't see how the tortoises could have wandered out alone, unless the steel gate was left unlocked.

Never happens, Magdall said. Bulleman shrugged. A lot of Las Vegas Valley residents own tortoises, and she spends a lot of time returning them.

"A lot of tortoises get out of their yards. That's how we get them," she said. "These were walking down the street."

Magdall and Hepker say maybe the person who pinched them got to feeling a little guilty -- or got caught -- and let them go.

"I think somebody's daddy came down on them," Hepker said, adding he was amazed they were being returned.

"I wouldn't have made book on that the other day," he said. "I figured they were gone."

After the disappearance, Magdall brought the two remaining tortoises into the house or watched them as they roamed the side porch and back yard. They wandered in and out of the house Wednesday, awaiting their siblings' arrival or waiting for grapes -- hard to tell with tortoises.

After the arrival of the missing reptiles, they placed all four back into the outdoor habitat designed for them. Hepker said they simply had to live outside for their own good.

Magdall conceded. After all, a tortoise needs to remember it's a tortoise. Microchips identify two of them, and her telephone number is written in permanent ink on the shells of the other two.

She reached into a plastic bin on her dining room table and stroked the heads of two palm-size baby tortoises. They'll stay inside until they're bigger.

"They start out so small," she said, smiling at them. "Isn't life something?"