A Welcome Visitor

Tanner told me it was in the grass. I thought it was another rock, but I quickly discovered that we had a visitor - a lovely Painted Turtle! This is the first turtle I found on the farm in the five years I've lived here. It is the same type of turtle I found partially eaten on the road recently. When I was growing up in rural New Jersey - yes, 35 miles west of Manhattan was considered rural - we had turtles wandering through all the time. Now they are rare indeed. Agricultural chemicals plus loss of habitat diminish their numbers. I carried this little turtle up the hill, farther away from the road, and placed it in the hawthorne grove where there are rocks and a spring nearby. We have no shortage of snapping turtles here in upstate New York and I saw a tape on TV of a turtle invasion on the JFK tarmac. Hundreds of sea turtles in search of a mate climbed out of Jamaica Bay and swarmed over the runway. What a thrill to see them and very comforting that the airport officials stopped air traffic for two hours to scoop them up and return them to the water.