Aly, Vel and I took a walk off the beaten path on the south side of the wetlands on Monday. I was leading and got us on an unintended path which terminated in a swamp outlet creek (dribble really). Aly lead us out, and ultimately to the spot I was trying to find, the ancient beaver site. I was trying to get her attention as she walked through and past it. I figured we'd see it on the way back so simply caught up. The path lead through a stand of willows. Somehow I got to lead through that and the dry swamp grass to the same outlet creek, though much closer to the shore. Here it was 10 feet across. We did stop at the beaver site and I counted 13 downed trees without having to move around. I know there are more there. We saw this little guy on the parking lot side of the Shop Creek bridge. When I went to pick him up it felt like his breast plate was pushed in a bit. I placed him on the mud under the bridge just so no one would come along and stomp him.
Yesterday I took Aly up to the Aurora History Museum to see the "Googie" architecture exhibit. The style is named after a restaurant which first employed it. There were maybe 25 photographs of buildings along East Colfax Avenue in Aurora. I drove a good section of the street on the way home. We saw just about all the sites in the photographs and then some. It was a fun drive. I noticed the clouds on the way home. I set up the camera on the back deck and took a picture every 30 seconds for a bit over an hour. Here's what it got at an effective playback rate of 15 fps. As promising as the build up looks, we got no rain out of any of the clouds.
3 comments:
How little was that turtle? Have you seen many turtles in the area? I know at clear Lake they would hang out, sunning themselves, on trees that had fallen into the water, and as you walked near by they would leap (slide) off into the water. I caught a 6” lake turtle once, thinking I keep it as a pet. This is when we lived on Lakeshore Dr. across from the Whistle Stop. I drilled a hole in the shell near the back leg of the critter and attached a 60# test fishing line to it and tethered it to a tree. A couple hours later I went to check on it and brat had broken free and I found it near the lake shore. I thought I’d reclaim it but then had an after thought that it needed to be in the lakes’ water to survive, at which point I removed what was left of the fishing line and watched it stroll into the water. I can only hope that it lived for many more years.
Another time I found a dead turtle at the lakeshore and brought it home to bury it with the thought of digging it back up in a few months to a year to get the shell after the ground critters had cleaned it off. Well I forgot about it and when I did remember we had moved to Bella Laguna and did feel like going into that was now someone else’s backyard to resurrect the carcass.
Just had another thought of turtles. David Way and I once stumbled across a nest of hatching lake turtles one spring. We sat and watched for about an hour as the little guys struggled out of the lake mud there the eggs were buried in and crawl to the water to swim away. That was pretty cool to see.
Okay, enough about turtles. You video is pretty cool; it’s just like something you would see in a horror flick.
By the way, is that a snapping turtle? From the look and length of the tail I think it could be.
It could well be a snapping turtle. The picture posted on the Colorado Herpetological Society's turtle identification page comes closest to matching my picture but doesn't show a tail. I wish I had paid more attention to the little guy's head and mouth. The critter's total length was under four inches.
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