how we came to have this turtle

For those of you who are not familiar with Big Mama yet, she is our 23 +/- year old red ear slider. Our son, when visiting his grandparents at age 10, fished her out of a golf course pond and brought her home when she was about the size of an old 50¢ piece.

Big Mama with her posse.

I've probably told this story before but here goes...

We had no idea when he brought her home that 23 years later we would still have her. In fact, he brought home two baby turtles but the other one didn't survive the first night, having gotten flipped over and drowned. This was back in 1989, long before any question could be answered in minutes by typing it into a search engine.

We got the surviving little turtle a ten gallon fish tank and when she outgrew that we got her a 20 gallon tank and when she outgrew that one we got her a 50 gallon tank and moved her outside. And when she outgrew that one, she got a small kid's swimming pool with a fence around it and when she outgrew that one...well, you get the picture.

The pool got bigger, someone donated a smaller red ear slider they no longer wanted to care for and one day, the big turtle laid an egg on the sunning stone and immediately smushed it.

I guess that's when the Big Turtle, to distinguish it from the Little Turtle, became Big Mama. Previously we just referred to them in various forms of 'big' and 'little'. Cup Of Soup and Hors d'oeuvre come to mind.

Once the turtle became a girl turtle we decided it would be cool to have little baby turtles so we fenced off a section of the yard around the pond. Well, first thing, Little Turtle made his escape.

Eventually we moved the turtle compound from the back yard into the front right in front of the house where there was a little porch (behind that porch was our bedroom) and included a water garden for plants from an old bathtub. We had the water circulating between the two 'ponds' with a filter which had the added benefit of keeping Big Mama's water clean and fertilizing the water plants. It was very pleasant to hear the sound of the water at night in our bedroom.

Don't imagine anything grand, it was a built-in cast iron bathtub and a small waterlily kidney shaped pond and about 30 sq ft of roving space for the turtle. But it was the source of a lot of fun and pleasure and a pain in the ass every spring when we had to muck it all out. The waterlily kidney shaped pond became her permanent pond, not very big around but about 3 times deeper than the wading pools. She grew to about 10” and laid many clutches of eggs over the years but we never got baby turtles.

After we finally made the transition to the country house, that first year Big Mama still resided at the city house with my SIL taking care of her. 

Big Mama's big pond.

I wrote about bringing her home to the country house to her new 8' diameter x 22” deep pond in the Little Back Yard here. This is her second year out here. The first year when the 'urge' came on her to dig and lay eggs, I just took her out of the pond and let her roam for a couple of hours, putting her back in the pond. She eventually laid three eggs on her sunning stone and smushed them. Full circle.

This spring, I rigged up a ramp so she could get out of the pond when she so desired. The problem is that the dirt out here has a lot of clay and is so hard. Last year my grandson went around loosening up the ground for her with a garden claw whenever she started digging but that just sent her off to another hard spot.

She has spent the last several months, attempting to dig a hole. She learned how to navigate the ramp into the yard without taking a nose dive into the landscaping bricks but she has never understood that the same ramp will take her back to the pond. Until this last weekend apparently.

Five days of rain and she was able to dig an adequate hole. Last Thursday, she dug a hole and laid two eggs as near as I could tell, but she missed the hole, smushed the eggs, and the ants made short work of them. She seems to have successfully dug a hole, laid eggs, and filled it back in again on Saturday. And made it back into her pond. Hopefully by next spring we will have improved a ground area for her.

The first hole, those white things at 7 o'clock are the remains of the shells.

The second, successful(?), lay.

I doubt any eggs that might be in the ground are fertile since it's been many years since we had a male. We have supplied her with several over the years but she runs them off eventually. They are pretty single minded in their intent and she tires of the attention.

Anyway, you wouldn't think that turtles would be much of a pet, but she has been very entertaining over the years. Different sources say they can live anywhere from 25 to 50 years. That's why I was a little upset to see that there was a vendor at the Freedom Fest here in Wharton that was selling baby red ear sliders. He must have had 50 of them. How sad, I thought, every one of those tiny turtles will probably be dead within six months.