Pond Maintenance

 I've blogged before about our back pond and the Eastern Painted Turtles which call it home.

This is one of them, although I'm not sure which, caught in a net. I did not intend to catch a turtle in a net. Well, at least, not this turtle.

But first, about that net.

When we moved here there was a net, not unlike the one shown above, and it was stored under the deck by the fish pond. And one day when I went to use it, a cold day, it had frozen to the ground. And the net ripped. To the trash it went. And sometime after that we got a new one. But I completely forgot that. 

Having this new(ish?) net made it very easy to scoop the fallen leaves and unwanted plants (is it still "seaweed" if it is in a pond?) out. Which is what I was doing when I caught the turtle. That I didn't want to catch.

I might have wanted to catch Snappy. Patty and I were concerned that Snappy would look to dig into the bottom of the fish pond to spend the winter. The problem is that the bottom of the fish pond is a layer of river pebbles over the pond liner. And we worried that the dedicated efforts of a snapping turtle would rip through he liner.

So Patty kept telling me to use the net and catch Snappy, and then relocate him to a more appropriate winter home. And I kept saying we didn't have a net, I had thrown it away. (One of us was more right than the other.)

But it seems that Snappy decided on her own to go looking for better winter digs. Either that or there is a Snappy sized hole in the the bottom of our fish pond, currently plugged by a Snappy sized Common Snapping Turtle. Time will tell.