… what, five days ago, when the temperature dropped to -6°c overnight, and got barely above freezing during the day?
Yeah.
It was 21° as I took these this afternoon. North Carolina, man…
Six yellow-bellied sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta) had piled onto the limited real estate of Turtle Island to enjoy the sun, showing that they’re adept at detecting the air temperature even while the water temperature was still recovering from its ice shield just a few days back. Are they triggered by the sunlight to at least poke their noses up and test the air? I admit, I’m impressed.
Not five meters away, a floating log was hosting its own collection.
Seven here, in this case eastern painted turtles (Chrysemys picta picta,) all less than a third of the mass of the sliders – their belly plastrons were roughly the size of my palm. Waste no time.
We go in a little closer.
Actually, as I uploaded this I realized I was wrong: you can see by the stripes on the face of the ‘taller’ one on the left that it’s another slider instead. I’m pretty sure all the rest are painteds.
The Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) had also wasted no time, and were scurrying around in many places, but I caught this one basking on the grape arbor we erected late this summer.
We used some old nylon rope as the stringers, but we’ll probably replace it before spring. The anoles, however, have already expressed their delight in this simple structure, and will probably lose their shit when the grapes leaf out and the insects are plentiful. Since I ended up evicting several that were sleeping in the matted leaves in the base of the pots that held the grape plants all summer (while we waited for the cable provider to get around to patching the line across the yard, right alongside the arbor – you can piece the story together from there,) I’m glad that they’re seeing the benefits of the arbor at least.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going for a swim…