Making babies

A well-tended garden is a welcoming place. Just walking around, taking in the different smells of the flowers and textures of the plants can be a very calming experience. And in the 10 years that I have been working at Ann’s Place creating healing gardens, we have had many visitors. A common one has been the birds making nests in our mailbox, front sign, on top of lighting fixtures, and this year on top of a pillar that supports an overhang shielding the front entrance. Tiny hungry birds chirp hidden by the pillar as a parent flies to an adjacent shadblow serviceberry collecting the fruit, which has just ripened. But this year it appears we have more than birds; we may have snapping turtles.

I was alerted to this by staff members who sent me pictures, asking for advice about the turtle, which was a snapper. It was looking to dig a nest for eggs along a short stone wall near the entrance of the building. It had lumbered across the parking lot and climbed up the wall looking for appropriate spots to lay her eggs. Ironically, in all of the discussions I had with the staff, they referred to the turtle with a male pronoun; I reminded them that males do not lay eggs.

By the time I arrived at  Ann’s Place to see what had happened, the turtle had left (with some assistance of a staff member who guided the turtle toward a safe spot to reenter our adjoining wetlands) but had left a large mess. It tried to make a nest in many different places but only two looked disturbed enough to have had eggs placed into them. I carefully raked mulch back into the area ensuring that it was not too deep in any one place. I then decided to protect the eggs with steel mesh as foxes, racoons and other mammals consider turtle eggs a delicacy. I rolled out mesh four feet wide and staked it down carefully around the edges with landscaping clips. My wife Juana made a warning sign that we staked near the area that is most likely a nest. Charlotte mapped out all of the disturbances as a reference.  Because turtle eggs take 80-90 days to hatch, I will remove the mesh a little after Labor Day and keep an eye on the space to see if we have little hatchlings. More new life at Ann’s Place. A good thing.