Turtle Tagging

I love turtles, and I find most people do. These (mostly) sweet and harmless reptiles with their good sense of style and "take it easy" attitude are hard not to love. Here at the homestead, we have our fair share of turtles. Several very large red-eared sliders have been finding their way into our yard to the chagrin of our puppies. Over the past few days, I seem to have a side career of rescuing turtles from curious puppies and returning the reptiles to the pond in front of our house.

This morning, I had the "aha!" idea of marking the turtles with nail polish on their shells to see if we either have a bumper crop of super large turtles or if we have some not-so-bright turtles on our hands. My brilliant husband suggested that we actually paint numbers on the shells.

As I was returning "1" to the pond today, Maggie (our German Shepard bird dog mix puppy) found what soon became number "2." My family couldn't believe that I left with one turtle and returned with another on that quick walk.

We have been using our handy National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Southeastern States to identify our turtles.  A couple of weeks ago, we used our guide to identify an Eastern Box Turtle (three toed race).  If you live in the Southeastern states and enjoy getting out into nature, I highly recommend you pick up your own copy of this guide.

   

Also, check out this interesting article about the turtle industry in Louisiana.  I didn't even know we had a turtle industry, much less that we dominated the market.