Straining to Escape

By Laurie

In mid-April 2018, Beverly found several small Painted Turtles in the pond skimmer, so we put them into the pond to see what they would do. Several days later we found a large Painted Turtle caught in the leaf net we have over the pond in the fall and winter to keep leaves out of the pond so we put that one in the pond, too. After doing some research, we guessed that the smaller ones were either immature or males and the large one was a female (the females are larger than the males so they have room for their eggs).

For more than a month we would see the turtles swimming around the edge of the pond. We made a flat “turtle rock” that jutted out of the water so they could sun themselves and would frequently see multiple turtles on the rock (apparently I never took any pictures of the turtles on the rock). From mid-to-late May, we had a lot of rain and the pond water level was higher than normal and sometime during that period, the turtles all left the pond.

No turtles were seen in the pond again until June 2, when we saw another Painted Turtle trying to climb out of the pond; I took these pictures from the house (it was raining). We watched the turtle attempting to climb out of the pond at several different locations around the edge but it fell back into the water each time. it must have succeeded eventually because we haven’t see it since.

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