Obviously, we have two turtles in the back pond, who sometimes act like good acquaintances, other times, not so much. Today seemed like a good day, a peaceable kingdom back there in the water, on the 80 dollar turtle dock. I enjoy watching them, and the dancing, zigzagging blue dragon flies. Last week I even saw a pair of dragonflies mating. Intense. I have decided that the smaller turtle is a male, in spite of what the pet store owner said. Thus, if he isn’t Belladonna, to go with Esmerelda, he must be Quasimodo. Esme and Quasi.
Later in the morning, Mary heard Schuster barking at a little fence inside the south side of the garden. Schuster had discovered a Box Turtle next to the little fence and he was trying to get at it. In the somewhat distant past, if we saw a turtle trying to cross a country road, we would stop on the side of the road, pick up the turtle and put him or her in the backyard where they would promptly vanish. Put it down, go in the house, come back and the turtle is gone. Then a year later, you see it walking casually across the front of the deck, only to have it disappear again. Mary said she encountered the box turtle three different times last year and in three different places in the garden.
Now it is August 4. This morning I went out to the pond to check on the turtles. Esme and Quasi were just hanging out in the water. When they saw me standing by the pond both came over and looked up at me, as if to say, “Where is the food?” Having two turtles looking up at me is somewhat disconcerting. I watched them for a bit, then the bigger one, Esme, went after the smaller, swam up on his back and snapped at him once. He smacked her with a hind leg; at which point he took off across the pond, she literally on his tail. I decided I had better get them some food, since they were probably feeling peckish, and thus the scrapping.
When I returned, both came back to the feeding place, and ate everything I threw to them, which was plenty, mealworms and pellets. I was pleased to see that they were eating side by side without any problem. In fact Quasi snatched two pellets from in front of Esmerelda without incident.
Yesterday, there was one more turtle incident. Late afternoon, I think, our next door neighbor, Dana, called to say she had found a baby turtle in her backyard, and she wondered if Mary and I would come and take it to our yard. We would and we did. The baby was about two inches long; the three of us had trouble deciding what species it was. We looked up baby turtles on the internet, but it didn’t quite look like any of the numerous images there. I thought it resembled a baby snapping turtle, but the ladies weren’t buying it. Dana put it in a murky bird bath where it immediately swam to the center. Finally, Mary rescued it from the bird bath and carried it to our yard, took it back to the pond where she found a very large (all snakes are large to my wife) rat snake curled on the rocks there. She decided to take the wee creature to the other side of the garden where we saw the box turtle, and there she released it. We didn’t think to offer it mealworms until too late, and thus the current turtle saga comes to a close. Here a turtle, there a turtle, everywhere a turtle turtle yesterday. Would a rat snake eat a baby turtle? I hope not.
Turtles Stew?
What it is two turtles do,
When each is feeling reckless;
What it is two turtles don’t,
When both are feeling feckless.
The pond turtles: Esmerelda on the right; Quasimodo on the left. Both are red-eared sliders.
Up close and personal: Esme and Quasi