The sound of lovemaking reverberated throughout Assumption Island and it was coming from two tortoises that expedition leader Paul Rose had stumbled upon during a Pristine Seas expedition.
He just didn’t know what it was at first.
“You can hear a call,” he says walking off path and into a grassy field. “You can hear an ‘oooh ooh,’ like a pushing blowing kind of sound. Very intriguing sound. And that’s downwind from us so, its’ a big sound to come against the wind.”
He walks closer and closer toward the sound until he discovers where the sound is coming from. Two mating tortoises.
“They’ve stopped mating. I’m not sure if its because we’ve got close or because they’ve just finished, but either way it’s a wonderful thing to experience,” he observes.
“Two beautiful tortoises mating right under the bush. There’s nothing else going on. No sound on this island at all. So it was the sound of their mating that alerted us to walk 200 yards.”
Suddenly, the enormous male tortoise spots the humans and looks super pissed off and starts charging toward his human intruders.
Except he’s a tortoise so it’s not much of a charge, its more of a slow walk toward the humans.
“He got wind of us. Beautiful. Don’t move!” he tells his camera man. “Just don’t move don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t move anything.”
The tortoise walks straight up to the cameraman to the point where the cameraman gets scared and jumps backward with a “whoa, whoa.”
“Don’t move! Don’t move my *bleep,*” the cameraman says.
The tortoise then walked straight up to Rose. At this point, he’s even more pissed.
“This is the male saying, ‘I think you’ve interputed my mating session,'” Rose says.
“And what’s just amazing is that they are completely relentless to make sure you’re well off his territory which I thought might have been about 10 feet but I’ve actually been on about a 400-yard circut around her with this whopping great tortise determined to take a bite out of my leg.”
The tortoise continues his slow angry walk toward Rose.
“This is what you call dogged tortoise determination,” says Rose. “He hasn’t seen my finishing sprint yet! You can’t blame him. He’s over there in the bushes mating on this beautiful quiet island and I jumped up to take a look. Who can blame him?”
Not us. Rose was totally being a love blocker.
Finally, Rose concedes and runs off leaving the two tortoises to resume their romantic moment. This video is really something else, you have to see this tortoise move! Check out the video below.
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