Ben's Vegetable Garden Decoration

Ben came running into the house this afternoon and announced that he had a turtle taking a nap under his broccoli plant. He tried to show me through the window, but I couldn't see anything and I thought he was making it up. We did see a large turtle creep across the yard yesterday and he was afraid that it was going to try to eat his lettuce plants. I finally went outside and took a look and this is what I saw.

She is approximately 15-16 inches long. She went right under one of the broccoli plants and you can see the mud that she dug up behind her back legs. Ben had to show our neighbor, Lindy, who was outside in his garden. He said it is probably a female laying her eggs. He said that they use their tails to dig a hole deep down in the dirt. So, we came inside and looked some information up a snapping turtles and their eggs. Turtles can lay as many as 30 golf-ball sized eggs. The sex of the hatchlings is determined by the temperature of the eggs at incubation (that is just weird). The incubation period is 50-90 days (most sites said 80 days, but there were some variations), so probably around the end of August we could be watching the hatchlings march across the backyard towards the drainage pond. The hatchlings will be 1- 1 1/2 inches. Well, that was our nature lesson for the day.