Turtles!

Our turtle eggs hatched! As I mentioned in my last post, Kevin accidently distrubed a bunch of turtle eggs that were buried outside our back door. They made it this far without the raccoons getting in only to get a rude awakening, although we were able to save.... all of them! The four turtles in the eggs that got broken open all survived, four days inside the house with some nursing. We had 11 turtle eggs that hatched three days after we brought them all inside and buried them with a little dirt. I was cooking supper the other night and walked by only to notice a little arm poking out of a shell. It was so exciting to watch them breaking out of their shells and they were all ready to head for water when they did. When they hatch outside they run for the water as quick as they can because otherwise they will die.

I took 9 of them including our 4 out to our "turtle" pond the night before last at 9 PM just after they hatched. I can't get close enough to the pond in the front of the house so we decided we had a better place for them. We've let other turtles go there before. This pond is full of Wood ducks and there is a Heron who frequents it, but the turtles will just have to learn to stay away from her. It was a beautiful calm evening, and the only sounds in the forest were the Owl calling "whoo who whoooo who...."

Yesterday morning I took the rest of the newly hatched turtles to the pond and they all rushed for the water and some went right under and some took a few minutes so I could watch them swimming around. It was so neat. We are so happy they all lived and so grateful we got to experience them hatching! We've seen them running through the yard to the pond but this time we got to see everything! It was an experience I will not soon forget.

I should add, these are Painted turtles.

Now back to work. I got 11 pints of tomato sauce yesterday and 2 more pints of Watermelon rind pickles. We looked at the apples last night and they look great, they are still quite bitter though. We caught our friend, Deer Norman out checking to see if the apples were ready too! We got a couple pictures of him although it was getting dark. He looks great, he's an 8 point now and handsome as ever. We know it was him, no doubt about it. He has markings that are easy to spot, plus his personality is unlike any other deer around here. He thinks he owns the place, which I suppose in some ways he does!