Painted Box Turtle

Eastern Painted Box Turtles

Spring 2000

Here are a few pictures of the turtle patch and the box turtles that come into the yard. There is a corner of the yard where it is a transition from the wooded section to a more open yard. This is where the turtles usually show up. You can see from the picture that the area is mostly shaded and is bordered on the back and left with trees and vines. There is a gentle slope to the land and we have some erosion problems here that we will have to work on soon. This section is usually only mowed a couple times a year, up to maybe half a dozen times depending on how fast it grows. The turtles seem to like it because you can find them there off and on through the summer and fall. We have to mow it often enough to keep the scrubby undergrowth from taking over, but the grass and natural plants seem to get along just fine with that mowing schedule. It doesn't show in the picture, but there is a brush pile just out of sight on the right. In the summer the brush pile is more or less hidden by blackberry briars and sumac. In the late fall or early winter we cut the sumac and briars back. Once in a while we get some of the blackberries, but most of them go to the critters. There are also a lot of honeysuckle and wild grapes in the wooded section at the back of the picture. I have seen the hummers busy in the honeysuckle, but haven't really seen anything much in the grape vines. The turtle patch also has a lot of the wild berries that look like strawberries, but I don't think that is what they are. They are small red berries and the plants look like strawberries, but the blooms are yellow. I remember reading somewhere about a plant that had that description, but forget what it is. I'll have to see if I can find that reference again. It seems that something eats the berries, but I don't know if it's the birds, rabbits or turtles.

The turtles are kind of hard to find sometimes when the vegetation gets too tall. This picture shows one of the turtles down in the grasses. There are a lot of rocks in this area, and a lot of large leaves off of the sycamore and tulip trees, so it is hard to tell the turtles from the other things that are half buried in the grass. The area is well shaded most of the day, but there is some sunlight that comes in through gaps in the trees. The ground also stays damp most of the time because it is so shaded, and the turtles seem to like that. They can get a little sunning in when they want it or they can move just a couple feet back towards the woods and be in solid shade. Very seldom do they move completely out of the shaded area. I have heard that turtles may live longer than we do and will usually stay in an area the size of a football field their whole life, as long as things are suitable to them there. I would like to mark them someway to tell if we are seeing the same turtles all of the time, and to keep some kind of records about how long they live with us. I don't want to do anything to hurt the turtles so I guess I'll wait until I know the proper way to mark them before I do anything. It would just be kind of neat to know if it is the same turtle that you see every year.

The picture below is the first turtle we saw this year, and is the one that I think was the male. He was really hidden behind all of the taller plants he was in when I saw him. He was also up close to a old rotting log that has been laying there for a couple years. I guess these turtles are kind of lucky that they live where they do. They are on the back of our lot so that they are around 250 feet from the street, and the lot beside us is still in woods. Behind us is a pond on several acres of land with one house. So they don't have to worry very much about being run over. I would like to buy the lot below us someday so I can be sure that it stays in woods like it is now. Of course I wanted to buy the property with the pond behind us when it went up for sale and I didn't make that one either. However the property was bought by another man named John and he has a pair of Canadian Geese that nest there every year. This year I think they have about a half dozen babies Before the babies come along every year you can hear them go out in the morning for a flight as they circle around honking just after daylight, and they take the same flight every evening just before it gets dark. Once in a while one of them will come walking through the yard.

The picture on the right is another view of the turtle patch, a little closer in than the shot at the top of the page, that shows some of the plants a little better. I don't know what the plants are, but they have a lot of little white flowers all over them.

These plants are mostly short, about 6 inches tall or so, and are very thick. They usually grow good in the mid to late spring but tend to die back in the summer when the hotter weather gets here and things start drying out. We see a lot more of the turtles before it gets hot and the spring time plants are the ones that are growing. I guess when the weather gets hot the turtles stay farther down in the woods. I would like to know where they are laying eggs so if it is on our property we could make sure not to disturb the area by accident. I do have some tape of a younger turtle and will add some pictures as soon as I get the vid captures done. If I get lucky this year I may get some pictures of a really young turtle. Once in a while we do find one in the yard that is really small, not much larger than a half dollar.

Well, I went ahead and grabbed the picture of the baby turtle. The shoe in the picture is mine, a size 7 1/2 to give a sense of the size of the turtle. He was just a few feet away from a temporary pool that I had set up.

I don't know if he was there for the water or if it was just chance that he was that close to the water. I'll keep an eye out to see if I can catch one of the really small ones in the yard. I have found smaller ones in the yard in the past but not very often. Either they don't come into the yard until they get some size on them or they are so small that they are hard to see in the grass.You can tell that this is a young turtle from the size. Hopefully he will have a nice long life in our backyard or in the woods below us.

To check out some books that will help you attract wildlife to your backyard go to our Backyard Wildlife Books page or you might want to check out Turtles & Tortoises of the World .