Showing posts with label eggs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eggs. Show all posts

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Paging the Annie Sullivan of painted turtles

On my recent outing to my local wetlands, I harvested two small egg masses in hopes that Cashew will gobble them up. Apparently easier said then done. I wish I could communicate somehow to Cashew to let it know that those egg masses are food. Cashew expressed no interest whatsoever. Not even a sniff at them. I left for a couple hours and checked back on the situation. Still no change. A couple days passed and the eggs were growing and I was worried that the eggs would hatch and I would be inundated with hundreds of salamander and frog larvae and tadpoles. So I scooped them back up and returned them to their original locations. A few frog eggs were left over and the eggs have been growing. Perhaps by tomorrow I'll have a handful of microscopic tadpoles. Maybe that'll be more of Cashew's liking. I read in one of my field guides that painted turtlets like crustaceans and insects. Sigh. Next menu choice will be some live fairy shrimp....if I can find some.


Then today on the advice of a co-worker I got more fish. Three to be exact. I put them all in a tupperware with just a little bit of water. Cashew spent 90% of the time trying to scratch it's way out and 10% of the time just staring at me. So everyone got dumped into the fish tank. Hopefully Cashew will broaden its menu of food.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Eggs!

We went back to the control site on Monday after the big rains and found salamander eggs. Everything was super flooded and I was really restricted to a few feet from the edge of the pond...thanks to my knee boots. Those people with hip waders could really go in. We didn't find a large amount of eggs but the action may still be going on. We looked under a few good logs and didn't find any adult salamanders, so they may still be getting some action in the pond. Hopefully no one squished any salamanders while walking around the pond. That's the type of stuff I don't like to think about.