It was such a long way up the hill from the pond, and it took her all morning to finally reach the shady dogwood up on the lawn. There had been a drought going on for weeks now and she knew the ground was going to be really hard to dig in. It couldn’t be put off though. She was not in control of the weather or her body. The sharp edged rocks scattered all over the slope had scraped her belly and probably removed an entire layer of skin. She lay gasping, trying to get up enough energy to dig a proper hole. It mattered, if her family was to survive. The dirt was so hard and dry though, that she had to pee on it just to be able to loosen it enough to claw away a shallow depression. Water would have been nice, but of course, it was now six hundred feet back the way she had come. She tried again. Rested. Scraped some more, using her legs, her nails, all her energy. It would have to do. She felt movement in her innards, a sliding, heaving mass, oozing out of her. One, two, three, rest. Four, five. She collapsed in relief. Started digging again, covering them up as best she could. Not deep enough. She knew that, but it was all she could do. As the hot June sun sank lower behind the hills, she turned and started crawling back down to the pond.

The lawn got mowed once a week by guys on fast, zero-turn mowers. They rolled efficiently over the acreage kicking up dust clouds wherever the grass was thin. Their noise was overpowering on such a quiet day. They had not seen her digging out there and would probably drive right over the spot without realizing anything was there. I stood up, stretching my hunched over back, and walked over to get a closer look. Two of them were not even fully covered. There was no way they would make it through a mowing pass. Grabbing an old flower pot and some fresh soil from the truck, I carefully lifted the two outliers,  and shoveled a little extra dirt on the rest, leaving the other three to their fate of either a mower or a skunk.

The pot sat by the water garden at home all summer long, getting watered by an occasional rain or a passing garden hose. It never looked any different. I finally tipped the pot upside down to check on them in late September, figuring they had died. Two quarter sized baby turtles spilled onto my hand and slowly started to move their legs. They were alive! There was no sign they had ever emerged but there they were. photo credit: http://www.hiltonpond.org/images/TurtlePaintedJuv01.jpg

Now I had to do some quick research on what to do next. When I Googled “caring for Eastern Painted Turtles”,  I got a ton of information. It turns out they had hatched and then hibernated without ever coming out of the soil. I hadn’t known that was a possibility. When they hit my warm hand and started moving, they had broken hibernation. Not a good thing. So now I needed to put together a terrarium for them and care for them until spring, when they would be able to feed themselves.

I had a twenty gallon aquarium in the basement and started to get creative, while they scritched and scratched around in a cardboard box lined with grass clippings on the kitchen counter. Half the space I decided to make a swimming area and half a gravel bed with a miniature stream with plants. I went to the local pet store and got a little water pump, heater and filter, some turtle food, and a fluorescent light with a timer. It was fun to put together and Wallace and Grommet (after the English clay-mation characters) moved right in. They quickly learned to paw at the glass when they saw me come down the stairs in the mornings and I would feed them. They basked under the light, swam in the pool and even floated down the stream over the waterfall. It was nice having them in the house all winter and they grew from the size of a quarter to about two inches across by Spring.

When the water outside in the water garden seemed like it was finally warm enough, I took them outside and set them on a rock near the edge. Our pond is about thirty inches deep, twenty feet long and six

to eight feet wide with a waterfall at the shallow end. There are frogs and plants and a goldfish living in the water and trees and plants all around. It is a fine place for turtles to live. After a bit, one turtle slid into the water and started paddling around, checking it the new home. The second one ( I could not tell them apart) slid in and then sank right down to the bottom of the deep end and did not move. At all. No bubbles. He was dead. He must have gone into shock when he hit the slightly cooler water temperature. I had to reach in and grab him back out. Luckily, during my research on the internet , when I had first discovered them hatched, I had read about how to resuscitate a turtle. Not something you would ever think might actually be necessary to do. But here we were. The poor thing had drowned. I held him on my knee and got hold of his tiny front legs with my fingers and proceeded to gently pump his arms forward and back. Water started coming out his nose and mouth. I held him in my cupped hands to warm him up some and repeated the procedure. He sneezed and shook his head and then started moving his feet. I warmed him up a little more then set him on a flat rock in the sun near the water. He was breathing and looking around and then walked over and got back in the water. This time he swam over to his brother and was fine. Who knew? I was so happy he made it. And so glad I had read how to do that in advance of needing it.

Wallace and Grommet lived happily all year round in the pond and we saw them on a regular basis during the warmer months when we would sit relax there. We did not feed them. They found their own food and were not tame. They went back to being wild as soon as they moved outside.They and the frogs hibernated in the mud in the

winter and emerged each spring to grow some more. For four years all was well and they grew to about 4 inches across. Then, one night, a raccoon came in and fished them out, leaving me the shells as evidence. I have since tried putting other turtles I have found in there, but they are never seen for long. I don’t know if they walk away or something comes along and eats them. It is sad. I love turtles and I miss Wallace and Grommet, but at least they had a few good years and were not run over by a mower.

-Wendy lee, writing at https://www.edgewisewoods.com

November 15, 2015