I was browsing some old photos on my iPhone and ran into this one, taken last August. This turtle seemed to be happy chowing down on a mushroom.

Hard to make it out, but he’s enjoying the ‘shroom

He was actively eating and took no apparent notice of me.

Turtles are not common on Lavender Mountain, or at least I don’t see them very often. I have wondered how they navigate the steep slopes. I keep picturing a turtle stepping off an old road and rolling all the way down to the bottom of the mountain. Wayne, over at niches, keeps track of turtles he sees. I should be more organized. Soon.

Here’s another one I saw earlier.

Easy to lose this little fellow

It would have been easy to overlook this one, but he’s about as cute as a turtle can be, so I’m glad I didn’t.

Zeke and I (and Zeus before him) have four main paths through the woods, and two down Fouche Gap Road. We have walked a lot of miles over the last seven years and I have seen turtles only about five times, including once in our back yard and once as a bleached, white shell.  But they are quiet and slow moving, most of the time, so they are easy to miss.

In mild weather our dog Zeke likes to hang out on the elevated walk leading to our front door. It’s built like a deck with a gate, so he can’t get out into the yard. In the spring of 2011, he started barking at something in the side yard (which would be the back yard if I had oriented the house differently). It got to be a regular occurrence in the evening as it was beginning to get dark. We eventually saw what it was.

I see you looking at me

The fox paid no attention to the barking, and very little attention to us when we came out to look.

I think it was a red fox, based on the coloration and the black stockings. I am a little uncertain about this since he’s not really all that red. He also doesn’t have a very prominent white tip to his tail. But it doesn’t much resemble pictures of the gray fox I have seen. I wasn’t aware that the red fox is an imported canid, brought over by the English, naturally. The gray fox is the native, but the red fox has moved into essentially all the same habitats.

We began to see the fox quite often. Once, early on, he seemed to be a little uncertain, so he hid. Or at least he thought he did.

This shrub is not quite big enough

This seems to be the same fox in the spring of 2012.

Spring 2012

This fox (I assume it was always the same fox) was completely indifferent to our presence on the deck watching him. Once he actually lay down in the back yard, not far from the deck.

Let’s take it easy for a while

And then he took a nap.

Nappy time

After a short time, he got up, pooped, and walked casually into the woods. I don’t know whether it was an editorial comment, but it convinced me that foxes and dogs share a similar sense of humor.

A breeding pair had a den somewhere nearby, probably across Wildlife Trail, which runs down the side of our lot. I heard and saw the fox on the road occasionally when I took Zeke for his final walk of the day. I saw the kits once, and a neighbor reported seeing them on Fouche Gap Road.

The fox had a regular route that he followed every evening up from the woods, across our driveway and then into a neighbor’s yard. I heard them in the woods occasionally, sounding a lot like a dog, but not really mistakable for a dog.

We loved seeing the fox. It seemed that we were witnessing a part of wild nature that is rare any more, even in our rural corner of northwest Georgia. But eventually we decided that it was not a good idea for the fox to think humans were harmless. It seemed not such a good idea for either human or fox. So I started throwing rocks at him when he came into the yard.

And now we don’t see them any more.