Well today was the day we got a really good shot of Frank and Lisa on our walk. Judging from the pictures below and from similar photos we’ve seen on the internet, we think these are snapping turtles. We decided to call the big one that we saw rather clearly, Frank and the smaller one that we didn’t get to see so clearly, Lisa. However after doing some research online, we learned that the females had wider shells so we switched their names. So, when we came around the bend we saw Lisa just hovering in the middle of the ditch in plain view under the water, which wasn’t very deep. Surprisingly she didn’t take off right away though she must have known we were right above her taking several good shots of her with our camera. She almost looked dead just lying there. Later, we also found out that Lisa was probably feeding by wiggling her specialized tongue (that’s supposed to look like a worm), out in front of her and quickly swallowing anything that thought it was really a worm and got close enough to investigate! She was very still and her shell blended in very well with the top of the rocks in the ditch. She even had lots of remaining dirt on her back (probably from burrowing under the overhang), which helped her look even more like just another piece of rock in the ditch. It was really exciting for us to see her so well and so up close. After we got several good shots of her, we diverted our attention to other parts of the ditch to see if we could find Frank and just then, he darted out from under the overhang, came up quickly, saw us, then immediately went back down to a deeper part of the ditch and stayed there for a long time. He really stirred up the water so it took a long time for the dirt to settle back down to where we could (kind of) see his outline again in the murky water. This is when I took the picture on the right. If you look close, really closely, you’ll see the outline of a turtle facing the other way from Lisa’s picture. It didn’t look like he was going to come up so we looked back in Lisa’s direction when we noticed she was gone! Despite what some people say about turtles being slow, these two were fast! … and so ended our exciting evening of turtle viewing that came and went, just like that! Hopefully we’ll see them again on one of our walks. I wonder how big they’ll get and about how old they are now?

Click on these pictures for a larger view!