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WASHINGTON POST (DC) 26 October 06 Plodding Pals - Turtles Burrow Into Our Good Graces (Adrian Higgins)
Gardeners learn to live with most creatures. Rats are no fun and require ruthless measures to remove them, including dismantling the compost pile. The mouse-like vole can make the difference between growing hostas or not, and the white-tailed deer will munch blithely on the most expensive shrubs and perennials.
A great blue heron found my puddle of a pond well inside the Beltway and helped itself to the Japanese koi. I no longer warm to herons.
One animal that is universally loved is the box turtle, uncommon but found in city and country gardens alike. It will help itself to your strawberries, tomatoes and any other fruits its leathery neck can reach. But people who are lucky enough to have them feel a deep need to protect them. Perhaps it's because the turtle doesn't make any effort to leave the scene of the crime, except perhaps to tuck its head in its shell.
In the coming weeks, the land-dwelling box turtles will find some soft soil or deep piles of leaves and start to burrow for the winter. When they have tunneled below the frost line, they will hibernate, to reappear at dogwood time, when the cool spring soil has begun to warm.
But just as box turtles can get under your ground, they also can get under your skin. Susan Belsinger has lived with one for nearly 10 years at her three-acre property in southern Howard County, near Brookeville. She says she can tell from its markings that it's the same turtle. The eastern box turtle is one handsome tortoise, by the way, brown with orange streaks. Females have dark red eyes; males have bright red or orange ones. Fiery glances from so placid a creature.
Whenever Belsinger is in her vegetable garden or strolling down the deer trails to the stream valley below, she is looking out for the turtle, even if she might not see it for weeks on end. Belsinger, who is an herbalist and an author, is fascinated by this particular reptile's world. Her property is part of a 22-acre family tract and adjoins a 150-acre farm. The turtle seems to regularly traverse the woods between the stream, the Cattail Creek, and the vegetable garden, a climb of approximately 100 feet or more, parts of it steep, and a distance of almost 1,000 feet. For a creature that is just a few inches high and must carry its armor-plated house on its back, this is no mean feat.
"That's a really long way for a turtle to walk," she said.
Perhaps it is sustained by the thought of the feast at the top of the hill: The turtle won't eat things like the eggplant or potatoes, but it will go along the row of tomato vines, sampling one within reach and then moving on to the next. "It's very maddening," she said. "Once a tomato has a bite out of it, it's not going to keep." Belsinger doesn't seem very maddened.
We are standing in the middle of her vegetable garden, perhaps 40 by 100 feet. The rows of herbs and vegetables are now frost-touched: The potatoes are still safe in the warm earth but the basil is blackened, the tomato plants withered, and the chili peppers have been gathered whether they are red ripe or not. There is one tomato on the ground with a distinctive gouge out of it, made by an animal with a triangular bite -- to wit, an eastern box turtle. The hunt is on, so we strain our eyes to see whether it is still in the garden or has moved to the adjoining woods. Sometimes the turtle is half-buried in the straw mulch of the garden. "I've been weeding the rows and, oops, there he was, so he might be anywhere," she said.
Belsinger's rambunctious dog, Butchie, is of little help today. Along the trail to the stream, Belsinger points to the spot where Butchie once dug up the turtle, which was buried 12 inches or more. She put it back and covered the reptile without packing the soil, so it might easily excavate itself.
We descend the trail, eagle-eyed, but still there is no sign of the turtle. "I would say we have a 1 percent chance" of finding it, Belsinger said. We are heading to a grassy clearing made by the resident herd of two dozen deer. This is where she last saw it, three weeks earlier. It made no effort to retreat, just kept on marching.
But the clearing is empty, and we descend farther to the broad, gushing stream and its muddy banks. The turtle eludes us. Has it already gone to ground for the season?
Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times offers another explanation in his book about an 18th-century English tortoise ("Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile," Knopf, 2006), written in the reptile's voice. Timothy escapes the garden bounds because the tortoise's human minders have a different rhythm to life. "What they notice they call reality. But reality is a fence with many holes, a net with many tears. I walk through them slowly. My slowness is deceptively fast."
Most people come across box turtles as they cross the road. This is a perilous exercise for them. If you feel inclined to help the turtle and can do so safely, make sure you place it on the side of the road it was trying to reach. Julie Zickefoose, artist and author of "Letters From Eden" (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), writes of her need to save turtles from automotive death. "I can't walk by creatures in need," she writes. "And I get to take home the greatest treasure of all; a warm glow, knowing that one more turtle will lay her eggs."
One thing you shouldn't take home is the turtle itself. Zickefoose, atoning for keeping turtles as pets as a child, says we kill them with our kindness. They can waste away or wander off into the path of cars or lawn mowers in a futile search for their old homes.
"Something in me chills at the thought of keeping a box turtle for a pet, of putting a creature that may be as old as my mother in a cardboard box and, for the pleasure of having it, ending its reproductive life in the wild," she writes.
Belsinger, then, enjoys what may be the perfect arrangement: a box turtle that is neither a pet nor a stranger, but a friend who keeps her in sync with the pulse of the garden. She sees it as many as a dozen times from May to October, but the tomato bite earlier this month may have been its farewell gesture for the year. "Once it gets cold at night," she said, "they think about going under."
Turtles Burrow Into Our Good Graces

VERY Cool !

Yeah, nice read.

It's kind of sad, however, that there is only one turtle on a property that size! Maybe there are more than one, since most people I know can't really tell the difference between individual turtles. Hopefully, she only THINKS she's seeing just one.

Ratz, do we need to hold you back after the rodent comments? You weren't planning a smackdown trip, were you?

>>Ratz, do we need to hold you back after the rodent comments? You weren't planning a smackdown trip, were you?

Naaaa LOL!!
I think I can take it, we're not on the rat message board here. LOL
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PHRatz