Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Is anyone else unlucky enough to be in an area that is not getting the usual amount of rain? The area I'm in has only had a couple significant rains, just enough to get us out of burn bans for the time being.

I've barely seen any wild turtles, and no box turtles this year at all.

Mine came up nearly two weeks late from hibernation - only after our pitiful rains. Two never came up at all. Has anyone ever lost any because of this? They are ornate juvies from 2006. All were good weights when they went down and those that came up show some winter growth. But we had literally no precipitation for months.

The last one came up May 20th, so part of me still holds out a small amount of hope though I know they won't be up. It was one of my middle sized ones and my largest juvie (the big girl being my favorite ).

Not here in Central VA: typically we do not have dry winters, and if summers are dry, I just turn on a sprinkler in the pen when needed. I also have a very small pond in the turtle pen, so there is never a lack of water for them.

Hey! Where do you live in the Central Valley? I live in the Central Valley, too. Do you do rescue in Modesto, I'm curious?

VA is the abbreviation for Virginia.

Oops! My bad! [chuckle]

I'm in western Oklahoma, ornates are native here at least (easterns would probably die in this without a drip hose left on near constantly).

The problem is that the soil is extremely dry, you can soak it with a sprinkler for a few hours and dig down 6 inches or so and hit dry dirt. We also had an unusually cold winter with a few days hitting -10 - -11F. 0F is more like our "extreme" cold here. I'll water the pen a bit in the winter on the warmer days, but worry about soaking it much.

Of course now that they're up and we're getting high 90s to 100 F weather they get soaked daily. The problem isn't with it being hot and dry now, but rather what happened overwinter since two did not come up.
I'm curious if there's any in the Midwest or south that have had similar problems before, but then maybe not since these 6 to 8 month long droughts are getting more common in just recent years.

This has been an odd year, though. It hit 104F in early May, even before the turtles came up. It's mostly getting that hot because there's so little moisture plus the daily winds drying everything more.

There's a wild male that usually wanders around the area I live in (right at the edge of town with fields across the street). By now I normally would have spotted him half a dozen times but haven't seen him once this year. There's also a high concentration of wild ornates, RES, snappers, and mud turtles around the area my in-laws live (near a couple ponds outside of town) and so far I've only seen one RES out there even on the days it rained and the days after..