This one’s several days old now, but it fits, unless I find something better today (I’m typing this Thursday to have it ready, but will happily bump it as needed.) Out once again with the headlamp at night, I saw a dark spot at the edge of the lawn near the front door that I was pretty sure hadn’t been there before.
Despite the fact that this one was found not three meters from a previous mud turtle, this is not the same species as that, but a common musk turtle (Sternotherus odoratus) instead. And the reason why she’s semi-buried in the soft earth and has her neck extended like that is, she’s laying eggs.
This does, naturally, please me, since it couldn’t be easier to monitor the nest, and it now has two markers alongside it so I’m careful with mowing and weeding. Musk turtles never get very big, and she seemed to be a small specimen, as the next image attests to somewhat.
You can see the white clover blossoms peeking in there – she wasn’t more than 90mm in carapace length, though I was already disturbing her by getting down this low (you see that she’s retracted her neck now,) so I wasn’t going to make it worse by trying to measure her. The yellow stripes along the head are the best identifying characteristics, differentiating her from the various mud turtles that are almost the same size and coloration, certainly very similar carapace shapes. A few hours later, she had disappeared, and I tracked down to the pond to see if I could see her returning, but no dice.
I looked up the gestational period to know when to start monitoring the environs for signs of their hatching, and got wildly conflicting reports: 65-80 days from some sources, but 100-150 according to Wikipedia. That’s a hell of a big gap, and a long time for turtle eggs to hatch (my experience has been that it’s typically around two months,) so I’m going to assume that their source is terrible, or they were taking measurements in a cold climate – multiple other sources put the figure at 65-85 days, so I’m going to begin checking near the end of June. The newly hatched are quite small, usually less than 25mm in length, so they should be adorable, but perhaps quite hard to spot if I don’t actually catch them emerging.
Musk turtles are very aquatic, not even basking very much but typically using branches to do so; otherwise they’re usually found on the lake or stream bottoms walking along and poking for food down there. Really, their big trips out of the water are for exactly this purpose, so I’m glad I caught it. Hopefully, in about eight to twelve more Estate Finds you’ll see the aftermath – the newly hatched turtles will have to cover better than 50 meters of lawn to return to the pond, but that still appears better than some of the treks the pond sliders have covered to lay eggs.