Friday, August 9, 2013

Visiting Reptiles

A few weeks ago, a pair of box turtles wandered across my kids' path. What an opportunity to learn something about these handsome creatures!

 Our main interest was in figuring out if we were looking at a "he" or a "she". Wikihow helped us out...

For most box turtles, males have red or orange irises, and the ladies have brown or yellow.








 
 Males tend to have a concave underside, whereas females have a convex shell (presumably a spot in which to safely carry their eggs).
There were a few more helpful determiners, but these few were enough to get us going.

As it happens, we realized we had both a male and a female, and the fact that they were found together probably meant that they were a "couple".
We named them (Fluffy and Speeder, I believe) and turned them loose to make many more baby turtles. Hopefully the next family who lives here will enjoy them, too!