Mano a Mano

Old Yeller has been especially touchy about his girlfriend lately. You have to admire the challengers persistence. And take a peek at some of our yearlings (upper right corner of the rock and basking on the branch front left).

Exhibitionist Birds

C'mon now, little killdeer. I know that spring is the season when everyone feels a bit, er, frisky, but I'm getting tired of hearing your high pitched trilling everytime you guys feel the urge. I also feel that, although at first the turts seem to enjoy the brief distraction from their usual routine, at this point, you guys are just showing off.

Tis the season?

I have to admit, now that the mosquitos are out, lying on my belly for hours trying not to make any large, sudden movements (like swatting) has become a test of my restraint. I am now in full support of this fine invention....

The Mosquito Laser

Thank You, Bill Gates. Now if you could get to work on helping fine-tune google earth to the point that I could observe my turts, in realtime, from the comfort of the couch in my living room, I would be willing to stop complaining about all the problems with the windows OS.

The boys are having issues..

26 March 09 - Little Aquatic Flirtation

Turtle References

Links to some pdf's of relevant work on this species....

Survival in an Urban Environment (2003)

Use of terrestrial habitat (1997, Thank You, Devin Reese!)

Interesting paper from the Mojave that I just found (2002)

I'll see if I can upload other papers onto the server and link them. There is some good stuff on these turts.

Bitey Bitey Turt

Turtle Piggyback Fun

filmed: 24 March 2009

The Beginning

Alright, so here is the current deal. We have a small population of Western Pond Turtles that live in a small (.25 acre) reservoir here in the foothills of California. These guys are pretty isolated from other turtle populations due to the altering of water sources and the sheer distances between the few stock ponds and reservoirs in the area. In our case, the small pond where our turts live dries up almost every year in late summer. So we were curious, where do the little boogers go? Most of the research on these guys has focused on river systems where water is consistently available, so I had to wonder. What's up with our guys?

The lowdown? in 2007 I (Kat) started a project eliminating non-native bullfrogs from the few water bodies on the 4500 acre range where I am fortunate to work. In the reservoir where the turts are, I noticed that there was an enormous (both in numbers and size - we pulled a 5 lb frog out of there) population of bullfrogs and that all the turts present were adults, at least 12 years old (going by scute rings). And I wondered. If bullfrogs are known to eat anything that fits in their mouth, and food is scarce around here, and a hatchling baby turtle is just about bite-sized for an adult bullfrog, and it's kind of suspicious....... So I began taking out the frogs. I annihilated the entire adult population in one season and then a drought was nice enough to dry up the reservoir - killing any bullfrog tadpoles left. Soooooooo. Yep - you guessed it. The very next season, we had baby turtles. This got me thinking. Is it enough to eliminate bullfrogs? How are these guys surviving if they have no outside gene flow since their introduction in the 1930's? And where they heck do they nest in such a harsh system? Thus we began.....

Our Turts

Cute little buggers aren't they?







the first babies (as yearlings in the pic)