An Unexpected Find – Texas Turtles In Our Yard!
March 24, 2009 
2 Comments
This post does not have any green message in particular but it does highlight the beauty of nature and how it can present us with unexpected and rewarding finds everyday!
My wife and I are currently putting a long winding path into our front yard and my last few days off work have been spent digging and tilling and shoveling and digging some more!
Our New Path - A Work In Progress!
As I was digging and shoveling the top soil into a wheel barrow I noticed a particularly green looking stone, on closer inspection I found that my find was in fact a very small turtle! I quickly washed the soil covered turtle under our outside faucet and a shiny green turtle slowly emerged. My wife was in the back yard so I ran to show her the unexpected find. The sunny day quickly roused the little feller and he was keen on climbing across my leather glove and onto freedom.
We Found a Turtle!
The Family of Seven Turtles
On returning to the pile of freshly turned dirt I found another, and another, and another until finally we had a family of seven baby turtles! We placed a small pile of the dirt into an old cooler and set a dish of water and some lettuce in their for the family of lively turtles to feast on.
The family of seven quickly set to exploring their temporary home and some of the more adventurous turtles actually climbed the walls!
We quickly did some research online to find out what we should do with these wonderful little things and my wife found that we actually had found seven little Red-Eared Sliders also known as “pseudemys scripta elegans”.
Apparently the red-eared slider is perhaps the best known and most recognizable of turtles. The young red-eared slider turtles are marked with yellow, green legs with thin yellow stripes and a green head with a red stripe behind each eye.
We found out that the red-eared sliders are Texas’s most common aquatic turtles.
The Red Eared Slider Turtle
The article we read said that these Texas Turtles can live more than 30 years. Sliders are cold-blooded and spend hours sunning themselves on rocks and logs. If there are not enough rocks or logs for all of them they will often stack themselves one on top of the other! They bury themselves in loose soil or mud during the winter to escape the cold. They eat aquatic plants, small fish, and decaying material.
The female turtles lay their eggs in holes that they dig in the ground and leave and one of those female Red Eared Sliders must have decided that our front yard was the best place for her brood. Our home is fairly close to a stream and small lake so we figured that’s where they originated.
The story has a happy ending, we took the family down to the local lake and set them on a quiet bank in the shade, they all happily made their way into the water and proceeded to swim off in different directions! Who knows, maybe we will see one of them coming back to nest in our yard again in the next 30 years…
You can find out more about the Texas Red Eared Slider on the Texas State website listed below;
i am from houston and we used to have these little guys in our yard too!
i miss them!
thanks for sharing!
Hi Lenny, thanks for your comments, we are going to keep a close watch for any more of the red eared sliders and put up a post each year if they return.