Steve Irwin Day Is a Tortoise's Birthday

In 1987 a Galápagos giant tortoise named Harriet moved to the reptile park that later became Australia Zoo, a 330 pound animal who had by then been in Queensland for well over a century. Records place her at the Brisbane Botanical Gardens by 1870, where she lived as Harry, after the curator, because nobody had checked. She was recognized as female in 1952. When she died in June 2006, genetic analysis had put her hatching at around 1830, give or take a couple of years.

Steve Irwin Day is her birthday.

Why November 15th

Terri Irwin announced the day in 2007 on the Australia Zoo website, naming November 15th as a commemorative day for her husband. She chose it because it was the birthday of Harriet, the giant tortoise he had been especially fond of, who had died the year before. Terri Irwin also asked people to wear his trademark khaki shirts on the day.

A common version of the story says the day marks his death. It does not. Steve Irwin died on September 4, 2006, about ten weeks after Harriet. The date belongs to the tortoise, and since she was a wild-born animal whose age was estimated from DNA and paperwork, November 15th is the birthday the zoo kept for her, not a recorded hatching.

Today it runs as the annual fundraiser for Wildlife Warriors, the conservation charity attached to Australia Zoo, with supporters raising money "to help continue Steve's conservation work."

Darwin's Tortoise, Except She Wasn't

For most of her life Harriet carried a bigger story than a birthday. She was "Darwin's tortoise": one of the small tortoises taken off the Galápagos by Charles Darwin on the Beagle in 1835, supposedly passed on and shipped to Australia. The link rested on circumstance. A retired historian remembered tortoises in Brisbane brought by "a Captain Wickham from England," and a Wickham had been first lieutenant to Captain FitzRoy on the Beagle.

The genetics did not cooperate. Galápagos giant tortoises sort into island populations distinct enough to tell apart from their DNA, and Harriet's placed her in the subspecies native to Santa Cruz Island. Darwin never visited Santa Cruz.

She was still a remarkable animal. She just was not that one.

Darwin's Own Tortoise Was in a London Storeroom

Darwin did bring home a tortoise of his own. During the voyage he collected a single juvenile on James Island, now Santiago, and it came back to England alive along with three other small tortoises. What happened to it next became a long argument, with popular accounts either sending it to Australia to live past 175 or losing it somewhere in England.

It had never left London. In March 2009 Colin McCarthy, managing the reptile collections at the Natural History Museum, found an old stuffed juvenile tortoise in a storeroom with "James" written on the underside of its shell. Aaron Bauer and McCarthy traced its paperwork in a 2010 paper titled "Darwin's Pet Galápagos Tortoise, Chelonoidis darwini, Rediscovered." The animal had been registered into the British Museum collection in 1837 and labeled from James Island. Three curators who cataloged the collection between 1844 and 1889 listed it only as a stuffed juvenile of unknown provenance, and one of them filed it under a species from Pinta, a different island.

Confirming that it came from James Island moved it to Chelonoidis darwini, the tortoise of that island, which carries Darwin's name. The record had been sitting there, overlooked, for more than 170 years.

So the day has two tortoises in it. One lived about 176 years, most of them in Queensland, under the wrong name and the wrong history. The other died young, was stuffed, and sat unrecognized in a museum through most of the same span.

The Crocodile Work

Money raised on the day goes to Wildlife Warriors, and crocodile research is one of the things the charity has paid for. Before the day existed, it helped fund a satellite-tracking study carried out from 2003 to 2005 and published in 2007 by Mark Read and colleagues, with Steve Irwin among the authors. The study tested whether moving a problem crocodile far away keeps it away.

Three large male estuarine crocodiles, 10 to 15 feet long, were caught in northern Australia by the Australia Zoo croc team and flown by helicopter to new release sites, carrying satellite transmitters. All three went home. The one taken from the Wenlock River on the west coast of Cape York and released on the east coast swam around the tip of the peninsula and back to its capture site, about 255 miles of coastline in 20 days. The paper called it the longest homeward travel yet reported for a crocodilian.

The authors' conclusion was practical: translocating a crocodile that poses a risk to people is very likely to fail, because the animal comes back. An animal that can find its way home along that much open coast is hard to manage around.

His Name, Her Date

The day carries his name and her date. Of the two tortoise stories folded into it, the one with DNA behind it is the better story: a Santa Cruz tortoise who spent more than a century being mistaken, first for a male and then for Darwin's.

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