We hit the Little Miami Survey spot again today and had the best luck so far.
In all, and within a span of about ½ hour, we captured and photographed 3 young spiny softshells, 2 baby smooth softshells, and one large adult male smooth softshell!
The young smooths was of course a very exciting find, documenting that the population is breeding successfully. A reminder from my last post, the smooths are much more rare than the spinys, have a much smaller range, and occur in a more limited habitat.
Today myself, Paul, Todd, and newcomer Mike G., from Columbus hit the riverbanks.
The smooths were lifers for Mike…and always a welcome find!
Believe it or not, we found a few newly transformed bullfrogs and Gray tree frogs and they were exciting finds. Although we have heard both calling in the past, we had up until this point been unable to capture one for photo-documentation.
This young bullfrog had just absorbed his tail
These gray tree frog larvae had front and back legs, and will probably become froglets within a few weeks.
The first softshell of the day was this young smooth that Paul captured. This was the first young smooth we’ve seen at this site!
Shortly after, three young spinys turned up. Here they are next to the young smooth for comparison. The smooth is the only turtle facing the right.
Here’s a scale comparison. The smallest of the turtles were about 2.5”. This year’s hatchlings? Thoughts anyone?
Soon after we had released the hatchlings, I heard Todd yelling… “GET…BACK…HERE!!!”…I wish I’d have photographed him as he chased an adult
Softshell through the shallows…I headed it off from the other direction and we were able to secure the turtle, which turned out to be a large male smooth!
Here are some pics of him:
A ventral shot:
And a couple of close-ups:
We weren’t finished yet, and another baby smooth turned up.
Since smooth softshells are such a significant find here, I got to wondering on the way home if the large male smooth was the exact same animal that we caught in the same region on July 10 or if we had found 2 different adult male. I started putting the photos of the 2 turtles side by side. The 2 looked very similar…but I started to pick up subtle differences as I looked closely and from different angles.
So HERE’s a GAME for you….
Remember the games we played when we were about 6 years old to find the differences in pictures? It’s kinda like that. See if you find the same differences in each of the 3 views. The first 3 are just comparison shots, followed by the same pics indicating the differences I found. (btw…the overall color of the 2 turtles was very close, they look different in some of the pics b/c of lighting)
After the sofshell experience we headed to a different park owned site that we are also surveying a mile or so away, on the same river. It’s much rockier here…but this is the area the river cooter came from 2 years ago. (a very significant find…they are not supposed to be in Ohio!)
Here are a view shots of the habitat, and Paul, Mike and Todd scoping for critters.
Nothing much to be found as the temps reached 90 +, but we checked our turtle trap
and…Not a turtle…but a nice channel cat that apparently couldn’t resist the sardine bait!
