Yesterday I went to chase a couple geese off a large flat rock that juts out over the water, meant for humans to sit on and not geese to poop on. Crossing the spillway I noticed a snapping turtle with a 9-10” shell in about an inch of running water, his head pointed toward the pond. I realized later that he had probably just climbed up the spillway after transversing almost 1/4 mile from the nearest pond, on a path through drainage ditches and culverts filled with runoff from an inch of rain over the past 24hrs. Nature is pretty darn impressive. I probably saw him just as he reached his goal and he wasn’t movin’. He joins the pond’s intentional members as well as the many unintentional pond additions. All together they make up our growing “natural” pond ecosystem, a little rough for a guy used to Systems Engineering.
