I took the dogs for a short walk Monday down to a dirt road that leads into the woods at the end of Wildlife Trail, the road* that runs along the side of our property. Not far into the woods we found a turtle having a late breakfast.
Turtles like some mushroom
This one was a little skittish. When Zeke approached him, he pulled back into his shell. Zeke is interested in turtles but doesn’t bother them. Zeke moved away and I was hoping the turtle would resume his meal. He didn’t, so we continued on our walk. When we came back 15 minutes or so later, the turtle was gone. But Zeke remembered.
Where is that guy?
It’s kind of hard to distinguish the mushroom from the leaves, but this is where we left the turtle. The mushroom almost directly behind Zeke in the middle of the road.Zeke is looking for the turtle. I think Zeke would make a pretty good turtlehound.
Added later:
As you might remember from a previous post, Zeke likes blackberries. He has started sniffing them out on our walks. So he’s also a pretty good berryhound. I don’t think I have ever seen a mix of those two breeds.
* The road is poorly maintained at best. It has deep ruts from runoff and the pavement is crumbling. I hope it stays that way.
Cool turtle and great-looking mushroom!
Thank you for the link to the cool cloud pic you posted on the blog.
Here’s a link to a TED talk by the founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society. Ten minutes of delightful cloud appreciation!
I note that this is a different turtle from your June 3 post!
I love finding box turtles eating. Mushrooms especially. They can demolish a good mushroom. I will usually take a quick look at any mushroom I run across to see if there are any even bites taken out of it, especially if it’s an amanita, which they seem to like. I think the mushroom above is a bolete of some kind.
There are a few guides to box turtle investigation on the web – one very good one for high school students. Several of the investigators actually do use dogs they’ve trained to point out box turtles. I think that’s a great approach, so long as the next step is not taken, eating what they’ve found (either human or dog). Our neighbor has a dachshund that spent an extended length of time abandoned. When they adopted Oscar they discovered he would persist at gnawing and chewing on box turtles until he finally gained entrance.
This turtle was quite a ways distant from the others I have seen.
Zeke has shown no signs whatsoever of wanting to chew or otherwise molest the turtles he finds. He was interested, but not too interested. When we came back the same way we had gone down, he looked for it again, but not the same way he looks for something like the fox. Lucy is more afraid than interested.