Tyler and Sarah Stewart of TortoiseSupply.com

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Family Christmas Card Photo, December 2012

By Tyler Stewart

After growing up chasing lizards in the deserts through the late '80s and early '90s, I started keeping and breeding jacksons, veiled and "blue" panther chameleons in 2001 on a small scale as "Bluebeast Reptile." Things slowly expanded through 2003, and by 2004, I was producing a surprising amount of chameleons monthly in a few different species. Almost out of luck, I turned out to be pretty good at what I was doing with these exotic and fragile creatures. I was heavily involved in the chameleon market through late 2007 when a few factors forced me to redirect my reptile addiction. More than anything, I was working many hours in my normal job, on top of being a single dad from a previous marriage, that I didn’t have the proper time to care for the 200+ chameleons I had on hand at any given time. With all the cage cleaning, cricket care and everything else that comes with it, I was stretched thin for time, and started to feel some chameleon burnout coming on (as anyone with multiple chameleons knows, it's a lot of work).

After getting married in early 2008, I managed to drag my new wife, Sarah, into this business with me, put all of the effort into the tortoises and weaned ourselves off of the chameleons that I had kept for so many years. I always had many of the tortoises running around, just never put the entire focus on them until that point. It's been refreshing to start something new, market something different and make a whole new set of friends in the industry while maintaining the old ones. Because of a good, established reputation in the reptile world, we kept the name "Bluebeast Reptile" after the switch to tortoises, and in 2010, we slowly transitioned over to "Tortoise Supply." Tortoises have been much easier for us to handle being in the desert of Las Vegas, and it offers us more time to spend afternoons together as a family, and to be able to get out of town when we need a vacation. Since nothing in the tortoise world happens very fast, we are young and patient, so we will be just fine.

Sarah and I were both born and raised in Northwest Las Vegas, and live here still. We have known each other since we were kids, but didn't date until a few years after college. We both come from large families, and spend much of our free time with them both here in Las Vegas and in parts of Utah. We love to go RVing with several other similar life-staged families on a regular basis all over Utah, Nevada, California, and Idaho. Sarah is a hairdresser part time, tortoise caretaker full time, and full time mom with our 6 wild boys, and is definitely the foundation of our family. She desert races in a new Polaris RZR in the Pro Stock class and has won that championship the last two years with Legacy Racing Association. We got a Polaris sponsorship in the summer of 2023. Hunter, my twenty one year old son, left home at 18 and is currently living in California. Every one of his little brothers wants to be just like him when they grow up. Mack, our fifteen year old, has started working construction this summer in the hot Las Vegas sun. He rides and races dirtbikes and has gotten to be a pretty good mechanic. Wyatt is our thirteen year old that does a lot of the daily food prep for our indoor tortoises, especially during baby season when we have a lot to feed. Gage is our twelve year old who is now doing all the supply order shipping. He will take an invoice with a shipping label and figure out the packaging needs and get it all done for pickup the next morning. Dexter is our dimpled nine year old blonde boy who melts hearts wherever he goes. He was our third attempt at getting a daughter. The final boy (again, boy) Ridge is our seven year old "baby." He has no fear, and will go on any carnival ride or bounce house that his brothers go on without hesitation. He has had a scab or scar on some part of his face since as long as I can remember. He broke his leg in 2023 and then broke his arm a few weeks ago in a dirtbike crash (summer of 2024). All of our boys work hard and are very involved in the tortoise business from packing seeds and herbal hay to pre-assembling shipping boxes. I work day-to-day as a commercial concrete estimator, do most of the care for the adult tortoises, egg laying and incubation, all our website work and e-mails, and am very active in the local off road side-by-side groups and race UTVs in the pro unlimited class at Legacy Racing Association and BITD series ("Tortoise Supply Racing" on Facebook, IG or YouTube). We also have a bengal cat, dog Goose, and a few snakes to complete our family.

More family photos:

Dexter exploring Mammoth Cave in Southern Utah.