{"id":101,"date":"2010-05-30T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2010-05-30T16:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=101"},"modified":"2010-05-28T18:54:56","modified_gmt":"2010-05-28T22:54:56","slug":"an-afternoon-visitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=101","title":{"rendered":"An Afternoon Visitor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the middle of the afternoon the other day, I wandered on to the back porch intending to sit at the table there and do some work. As I was getting set, I noticed that a regular\u00a0visitor, in the form of a female snapping turtle&#8230; the first of the season, \u00a0had arrived in our back yard. Needless to say, I decided that the work could wait and went and got the camera!<\/p>\n<p>As many of you know, we live on a piece of land that was once\u00a0pasture and\u00a0\u00a0that has as one of its boundries, \u00a0the Town River. Every year right around Memorial Day, a number of female snapping turtles visit our yard to lay eggs. I imagine that their anscestors\u00a0have been making similar visits for\u00a0thousands of year.<\/p>\n<p>These turtles lay their eggs by digging out a depression in the soil, depositing the eggs in the hole and then covering over the eggs with dirt&#8230; they use their feet as digging tools the front feet for excavating and thier rear feet for filling in. They prefer to lay their eggs where the digging is easiest, most often in Joan&#8217;s flower beds&#8230; it drives\u00a0Joan crazy. The mama turtle of this story went easy on Joan, she picked a bed that\u00a0Joan had\u00a0just dug over for use as a nursery bed for some hostas. I guess that the two ladies were thinking alike!<\/p>\n<p>Here are a few portraits of the old girl&#8230; the turtle to be specific!<\/p>\n<p>[nggallery id=9]<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the middle of the afternoon the other day, I wandered on to the back porch intending to sit at the table there and do some work. As I was getting set, I noticed that a regular\u00a0visitor, in the form of a female snapping turtle&#8230; the first of the season, \u00a0had arrived in our back [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,3],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-southeastern-ma","category-wildlife","tag-snapping-turtle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}