Box Turtle Nest CSI: Search and Recovery

 I never feel luckier to live here on this 80-acre sanctuary I call Indigo Hill than in mid-June, when everything--everything--is making babies. As I sit at my desk, there are red-bellied woodpeckers and downy woodpeckers feeding young just outside the window. I can hear two of the five indigo buntings on the land singing their heads off. Fledgling eastern bluebirds are churring, being fed. A prairie warbler sings in the birch out the south studio window.  This morning, I watched our male pine warbler feed a couple of fledglings in the row of tall Virginia pines that edge the meadow. The breeze is sweeping through the house, the tall grass is waving around blooming butterfly weed, and it is grand, simply grand. 

I'm learning how to find box turtle nests. I've been looking for years, but the skunks and raccoons almost always get to them before I do. Oh, how I hate to find dug-out nests, but I find them every year. Last year was a warmup--I got out early, found and protected two before the mammals got them. One nest hatched successfully in the first week of November--late late late!  I wrote about it in "Another Box Turtle Morning" a few posts back. By May 29, I had decided to dig up the second nest, figuring the eggs were bad, or the babies had gotten entombed. That was an interesting exercise. I found the remains of four eggs, and the closer I looked, the more I discovered. There were embryos, all right, but they did not seem to be fully developed, because there was a lot of yolk, too, which seemed to have gotten saponified in the process of decomposition. It's the yellowish white stuff here. 

In this shot, you can see a scute, or scale, from the baby's shell at the bottom of the mess. So they were pretty well-developed when they died.

There were embryos in all four, with shell scutes and and wee tiny vertebrae. It made me sad. I don't know why they didn't hatch. The nest was in a pretty shady area and I'm guessing they might not have gotten sufficient sun to warm them enough to develop all the way. The small cement block I put on the cage with which it was protected may have blocked even more sun. Sometimes in trying to help, we harm. I don't know. I just knew they didn't make it, and that I needed to do better by the next nests I found.

We don't want this--babies dead in shell. What we want is this. Here's the only hatchling I found of four from the other nest, in the sun-drenched middle path of the meadow. The others dug out and got away before I found them, in early November 2022. This lil fella hatched but decided to stay in the nest chamber over the winter (not uncommon). I felt him in there, then saw him with my phone flashlight. I covered the hole with loose soil and left him all winter long, and he dug out on April 26!

I carried him down into the woods and let him go near a stream. Long may he crawl. 

Finding a juvenile box turtle on my land is the sweetest reward for my work. I found this little beauty, about the size of a lime, on June 4, 2023, on the first rainy morning in quite awhile.

I didn't pick him up or disturb him unduly, just made a couple shots and walked on. 

Found this old gent in the driveway May 13--doubtless looking for a hen to impregnate.

This spring, I was determined to find the female box turtles while they were laying, which is from the first to third week of June. They need heavy rain to soften the soil enough so it can be dug, and we didn't get that until June 3. On June 4, Phoebe, Liam and I went out looking, and we found three hen turtles making test digs that very evening! 

They are very wary while digging, and we didn't approach them--just took a quick snapshot and walked on as if we hadn't registered them.

None of these test holes resulted in eggs--the females hit roots or rocks. There's a lot of that, and you can always figure out what she hit that made her move on. But this is still informative, because it tells you the vicinity she's chosen, and will likely try to dig again.

June 4, 2023--Phoebe is finally on summer vacation from her high school counseling work, and she joins Liam and me at home for some nature reverie. We find three turtles digging this evening. If there's anything more heart-stirring than walking with my own babies, looking for turtles laying eggs, I haven't found it. 

Raising Box Turtles

Wow. This Labor Day Weekend has been entirely too much fun. I did do a bunch of weeding and trimming and cleaning up, working out in the sun with the cicadas and crickets singing to me. Which I consider fun. We also went to the county fair and I whipped myself into a photographic frenzy, all those fancy chickens, baby pigs and midway lights. Wooo. The stuff of many posts. Just thinking about uploading all those photos makes me sleepy.

It's all I can do to put a post up. I feel like lying on a chaise lounge instead, falling asleep to cricket songs. But I'll show you the hatchling box turtles we're raising for release on our sanctuary. The idea is to raise them until they're big and strong and able to withstand chipmunk attacks and the like, thus giving them a better start in life and better chances of making it to reproductive age. You feed them like crazy, give them sun and exercise, hibernate them in the winters (well, at least I do) and then let them go. It can take three or four years, although some people who don't hibernate them and keep them under lights can get them to release size in a year and a half. Release size is 3/4 lb. Yow.

We've had Shoomie for three seasons now. He hatched in captivity from captive parents kept in a palatial turtle enclosure by my biology professor friend Dave McShaffrey of Marietta College. I believe Shoomie's almost ready for release; he has bulked up tremendously on Repto-Min Aquatic Turtle Food Stix. The tough part will be convincing Liam of that. Shoomie is Liam's turtle.

Every fiber of Shoomie wants to head for the woods when we take him outside. He's an adventurer. He's also kind of cranky and impatient, and is the only reptile I've ever seen throw a tantrum.

Before I learned about the Repto-Min regime, I used to try to get him to eat things like butternut squash and cantaloupe and strawberries. I'd put mealworms on top of them, or wiggle the bits with a straw until he was inspired to take a bite. Once Shoomie got a big mouthful of baked squash, realized it was probably good for him, and went on a stomping, head tossing rampage around the tank, plowing the remaining squash into the dirt. Twicked again.
Shoomie only wants live food. I got him to snap at the food sticks by putting them in his water dish, where Brownian motion made them swim around. He immediately snapped and was hooked.

Liam escorts him around the yard, always remembering to bring him back to his planted terrarium when the walk is over.This little hatchling came to us only this month. A woman had found it in her suburban yard, hardly turtle habitat, as a tiny hatchling, and raised it for almost a year on, of all things, hard-boiled egg. She brought it into the local pet store looking for advice on raising it for release, and the manager contacted my dear friend Leslie who called me. Apparently egg is a great hatchling food, because this little turtlet has the hardest shell and brightest eyes I've seen since Shoomie. She's strong and energetic , full of beans.I was a bit concerned that this turtle be exposed to live foods, too, so it would know what to do in nature. I think it expects hard-boiled egg wedges to drop out of the sky each morning. So yesterday I dug a couple of small earthworms and, after careful neck-craning and consideration, the turtlet grabbed them. Hooray! Big sigh of relief. Now I need to get her to take Repto-Min to keep that growth rate going.

No, I'm not sure of the sex of these turtles. Shoomie has a thicker, shorter tail, while Shelly's is long and thin. That may indicate that Shoomie's a male and Shelly's a female, but I don't know that for sure. Males don't get their red eyes for quite a few years, and I'd imagine that the hollowed-out plastron characteristic of males also takes some time to develop.

Phoebe renamed the new turtle Shelly. She's got her dad's gift for naming things (He's responsible for Chet Baker's name).
Phoebe adores Shelly, and takes her on outdoor adventures with Liam and Shoomie. But sometimes she just relaxes and exchanges thoughts with Shelly.