Sometimes as I write these posts, I wonder why I describe observations of the same critters in the same habitats year after year. To me it all seems new - any time I find, say, a spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata) it's a special and memorable experience - and the experiences deepen as I layer on the observations over the years, both as I can better distinguish what is different from what is normal (see something once, it's hard to tell) and as I develop a gut feeling for the annual cycles we play in - but reading the blog it can look like I recycle the same posts year after year.

What definitely changes is the social. Most obviously, I now herp with a baby. At six months she seems to devote most of her free mind to sensation, to intently watching scenery and people, to following new sounds, to touching and placing into her mouth new objects as her brain wires itself for a sense of the world we adults take for granted. I feel it is critical that the scenery and sounds are as outdoors as they are indoors, that her brain be imprinted with the waving green of marsh grasses and the sounds of birds in the wind, and, of course, that she run her hands over the shells of turtles so that the texture is as normal to her as the fuzzy baby toys she spends more time with.

I'm not the only one - of course I hang out with like-minded people, and last week we drove out to a marsh in New Jersey to find nesting diamond-backed terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin) and hand them over to our children.

This is easy herping, essentially road cruising. Ordinarily I look down on road cruising, but in this case it is the simplest way to find the nesting turtles as they cross the road or stop to dig nests alongside or in the road.

Jen, Magnolia, and I showed up before our herping buddies and drove around a bit. We saw a few freshly-dug test holes - female terrapins tend to dig several holes and abandon them before they lay their eggs in one, so we felt confident we were in the right place at roughly the right time. We saw a few nests that had been ruined by predators, with shriveled shells littering the ground next to the holes, but no terrapins.

What we did see were mud turtles (Kinosternon subrubrum).

 



These aren't nearly as well regarded as the larger, more objectively beautiful terrapins, but I find the little guys charismatic in a similar way as stinkpots (Sternotherus oderatus). I would have figured on females crossing for the same reason as the terrapins, but a couple of them were males.



Finally we saw a girl digging a hole. I didn't get too close, not wanting to spook her, but I could see something was funny about her right front leg.



We met up with Scott and his son Miles, as well as Ali (a plant person, but we let her tag along) and her very new baby, and we all piled into our car.

A little while later we found the same female, distinguishable by that stump leg (I am horrified to imagine how that must have looked when it was first injured) crossing the road, and we tortured her for a few minutes by letting the kids touch her before letting her continue searching for that perfect patch of ground to lay her eggs. 

 
She was the only terrapin we saw up on land (we did spot plenty of heads in the water), but one of the target species still counts as finding the target species, so we were pretty happy with her.

As we were with this delightful (to be fair, he was terrified) little mud turtle that we detained for a few minutes for a photo shoot.