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Best thing to come home to.

Checkerbelly

Checkerbelly

New member
No, I didn't come home to find that my snake laid eggs. I came home to find an eastern box turtle laying eggs in the middle of my backyard!!! Pics are coming along shortly.

Any ideas on how I should protect the eggs from racoons and skunks?
 
Here are the pics. Okay, I jumped the gun when I said she's laying eggs. She's working hard on a nest though!

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Oh my goodness, how awesome is that??!! :)
I'm thinking some kind of chickenwire barrier or something.
 
A five gallon pail, upside down with weight on top. If you checked it daily for offspring you should be ok, no?
 
Wow, with the first picture, I thought, "Ok, nice photo of the backyard..." And then I saw the rest of the photos, went back up to the first, and my reaction changed to, "Wow, that's so cool!" It was like playing "Where's Waldo?" for a moment! Congrats on the nesting turtle! :cheers:
 
Thanks for the comments. For now I'm going to put a piece of hardware cloth (metal screen) on the ground until I can rig something up. She's still out there. Not apparently moving anymore. Maybe she's laying... Yay my very own turtle and I don't have to take care of it at all.

The weird thing is that I'm in the middle of suburbia. There's a park about a 1/4 mile away but everything else is built up.
 
Not so weird, these two pics are from where I work. It's an industrial area just south of Washington DC. They had to climb a 50' 40° hill to get to the place I where took their pics.
 
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awww... what a sweetheart. She's really beautiful too. I don't know how to protect the eggs outside, but do you know how to incubate them? You can hatch them yourself and return the hatchlings to the wild. That would be a really exciting project. I don't know what your local laws would be.
 
sallydog77 said:
awww... what a sweetheart. She's really beautiful too. I don't know how to protect the eggs outside, but do you know how to incubate them? You can hatch them yourself and return the hatchlings to the wild. That would be a really exciting project. I don't know what your local laws would be.
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I've actually done that before with snapping turtles. These guys will already be on my property so I still consider them mine without taking them inside. :cool:

Maybe I should get some vegetable plants and build a nice compost heap for them.
 
alan said:
Not so weird
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Well be sure to let me know when one lays eggs outside your bedroom window. :p

Update. The turtle left some time around midnight and it looks like she backfilled the hole back in. :cheers: Now all I have to do is wait.
 
How cool! Do you normally have racoons or skunks in your yard?
 
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That is way cool... if you do cover the area with hardware cloth, make sure you cover a fairly large area and maybe hold it down with tent stakes? Just the 'coons or skunks might be willing to dig a fair ways just to get to such a tasty snack.

Looking forward to seeing pictures of the babies climbing out down somewhere down the line though.
 
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