Virginia is home to Eastern Box Turtles. We have seen ones before, traversing our yard, so we knew they were in our area. Last evening we were on an after-dinner walk, and we noticed a box turtle beside the road. We investigated closer and discovered she had just laid eggs in a hole she had dug! There were about 4-5 of them. She was at that time slowly putting the dirt back in the hole to cover them.After we got home, we did a little research on box turtles. We discovered that "box turtles generally grow slowly, reaching sexual maturity at between 7 and 10 years old and 5 or 6 inches in length. Once mature, a female box turtle will lay between 3 and 6 eggs each spring in a shallow nest. The eggs are left unguarded and hatch in the late summer or early fall when hatching occurs."
The mama did a pretty good job of covering back over the next, don't you think? You can hardly see where she dug! We went back at the end of our walk to check on her progress! Unfortunately, she didn't do such a red hot job in choosing the place in which to dig the actual nest--the median between the road into our subdivision and the sidewalk!
We will keep an eye on the nest as it gets closer to fall, but I doubt we can do too much. The nest is at the opposite end of our little neighborhood, close to where the main road is. If only she had dug closer to our house! At the end of our cul-de-sac, there is a wooded area and a creek! If any of the eggs (1.)do not get dug up and eaten by skunks or racoons, (2.)manage to actually hatch and get out from underground, and (3.) aren't immediately eaten by a bird or dog, or run over by a car, then we might try to move them (if we can ever even see any) down by the creek. Again, quoting from the website, "When a box turtle first hatches from its egg it is a mere 1.25 inches long. Little is known about the lives of young box turtles because they are so secretive and hard to find. In fact, it is very rare to find a box turtle much smaller than about 3.5 or 4 inches long. It is thought that these young turtles spend most of their time concealed in brush and leaf litter and feed primarily on insects." So it sounds like it would be a rare feat indeed to actually see a tiny baby box turtle! It would be really, really cool though. There is no "brush and leaf litter" where the mama decided to make the nest, however! Just the shadow of a stop sign and plenty of grass!
3 comments:
Wow,what a neat discovery. Any thoughts on actually moving the eggs.... maybe trying to dig several inches below the eggs and moving dirt and eggs together to a better place? It would be so fun to be able to watch them hatch.
Yes, we thought about that. From reading on the internet, it's not easy or likely to be successful. YOu have to make sure the egg stays in the same position it was (can't turn over or anything), and there are a lot of particulars as far as depth of nest, moisture, etc. Lots of people have tried it, and then no eggs hatched. It would sure be a lot easier to keep an eye on them if they were closer to us though!
The same day you posted seeing this box turtle, my father found a baby (about the size of a golf ball) in his back yard while he and the boys were working on digging up some bushes. Caden kept it in a box and watched it and played with it all day. Then we let it go so it could go home to its mommy and daddy and eat.
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