This Land, Your Land

We got a good demonstration this evening that you can find wildlife in your own backyard when we came home from work to find an Eastern Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina) nesting in the backyard.

The Biology department at Davidson College says a mature female box turtle will lay three to six eggs each spring in a shallow nest. The eggs are left unguarded and hatch in the late summer or early fall.

We don't know how long this turtle was at it in our yard in Clayton, but it had a hole pretty much dug when we got home. Over the course of about two hours, it finished the hole, laid three eggs and covered the hole.

You can see the first two eggs in the nest here:

Watch our video of the turtle laying its third egg, which we couldn't get to load here, on YouTube.

And after the eggs have been laid, the turtle covers and fills: