Looked out through the screen door to Walkabout Studios this morning (did I mention that I have a screen door now? I’m very pleased with it,) and spotted something sticking up from the grass right in my line of sight, not six meters away. It looked more obvious than this, because once it saw me opening the screen door (did I mention?) it ducked down a little.
Pretty subtle, right? That was the idea of course. The head was raised much higher when I first spotted it, and if you asked me to sketch or describe the head shape of this particular species, I probably wouldn’t get it right, but the moment I saw it, I said, “That’s a box turtle,” and of course (did you doubt it?) was absolutely correct.
To be more specific, a largish female eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina,) which was great to see since this is the first I’ve found on the property, or indeed anyplace in North Carolina since 2023, southeast of here. They’re strictly a land species, and tend to like more wooded areas while we’re borderline swampy, but apparently she was fine with it. The curious location and facing direction had me wondering if she’d placed a nest someplace near my back door. I’ll keep my eyes open – we haven’t seen any obvious nesting behavior from anyone yet, despite the multitudes of turtles in the pond.
The brown eyes denote this as likely a female, by the way, but I didn’t pick her up to examine the plastron, which is another hint: the males have a distinct indentation, a concavity in the center, while the females are largely flat – I’ll let you puzzle out the reason why. She was a decent-sized specimen, too:
There’s something else that only shows vaguely here, while other frames show in more detail, and that’s the ridges of the carapace scutes, the ‘scales’ or shell sections. It’s hard to tell since the most recent ones are indistinct, but they develop a new ridge every year, so she appears to be from ten to fourteen years old. Her inner ones, the early years, are quite broad, meaning she was growing quite well for the first nine or so years of her life, but there are a bunch of very fine ones at the outside edges, the recent growth years, so it appears she’d slowed down – which might be perfectly normal, since she’s about as big as they can typically get.
I let her be for a short while, and checked up a little later on – she saw me approaching from a distance and was craning her neck to see better, though she’d withdraw almost entirely once I got closer. A few minutes later, I saw her plowing determinedly through the grass and weeds (we let the backyard go, because we don’t need a huge lawn and the critters greatly appreciate it,) and about a half-hour later, there was no sign of her anyplace, having either made good time getting out of the yard or finding a spot that concealed her from me – but that would be impossible, you know that.
Still, great to see, so I had to share.