depscribe's photos with the keyword: turtle

Our friend turns from the tomato and heads for the woods. The end.

Looking around to see if supper is safe.

Box turtles are omnivorous. They like berries, all sorts of fruits, and as previously mentioned, small invertebrates.

Box turtles can actually skedaddle when they get a mind to -- well, by land turtle standards, anyway.

So many directions to go, when you are a box turtle.

This turtle was more cautious than most. It was nearly 15 minutes before he peeked out this much. Those long claws are for digging -- they eat grubs and snails and such, and dig into the ground for their winter's hibernation. (They also eay deadly toadstool mushrooms. They are immune to the toxin, which they store in their fat. That makes them unpalatable to many predators and is the reason they're one of the few American turtles not eaten by people.)

I rinsed the poor fellow off, both to bring out the color and to get him to close up. Once, when I was a kid, I got a finger caught when a box turtle closed its shell. Hurt like crazy. I pried it open with a quarter. Neither it not I was permanently harmed.

You can tell that, interestingly, by eye color and shell shape.

Ridley's sea turtles nest on the beach at GTMO, and when they hatch children and their parents see the baby turtles safely to the water, before birds and other predators can get them.

A baby Ridley's sea turtle heads for the water. Once there, the danger of getting eaten by a shore bird is reduced, but life is still rough -- there's only a small chance this one reached adulthood.

They're sometimes called "pancake turtles," but soft-shelled turtles aren't all that thin.

The spiny soft-shelled turtle (so called because of the little bumps at the front of its leathery shell), is a foul-tempered animal that gets surprisingly big. It's a popular food item in parts of the south.