Pam the Turtle Lady

 

It is hard to say “no” to Pam. The main reason for this is because she is so nice. The other reason for this is that she knows the main thing that you (you meaning me) will be doing today is looking at YouTube videos of a cat playing the piano.

Recently she asked me to clean out a ditch.

Hurray! Ditch cleaning.

The other thing about Pam and why it is hard to say “no” is because she will be doing whateveritis that she is asking you to do.

So as I was recently cleaning the ditch… she was to. But she was going much slower. That is okay because she has a bad back. Come to find out… she was also looking for turtles and that slows down ditch cleaning considerably.

From the time I met Pam she has had turtles. She finds these tiny turtles and puts them in a aquarium and “takes care of them” for a few weeks before she returns them to the wild.

She is the turtle lady of Shipshewana. Even now although we don’t live there. The ditch we were cleaning out was in Shipshewana, meaning the turtle we found was in Shipshewana.

When we lived in that neighborhood there were little girls who were enamored with Pam and her turtles. They would “foster care” for Pam’s turtles. This means they would take an aquarium from Pam home and feed the turtles and look at them, etc.

I think the most turtles Pam and the girls have had is four or five at a given time.

As we cleaned out the ditch the other day Pam found a turtle. And per usual it went into the aquarium with some lettuce and some rocks. Plus the special water used just for turtles. 

Pam told one of the little girls about this new found turtle and she kept it for a couple of days. It was returned and is upstairs now. It watched “Fox News” tonight with me for a while. 

Pam told the little girl where she found the turtle and the little girl and her mom went there and found a turtle of their own. I don’t know if there turtle gets to watch “Fox News” or not.

All the neighbors in that neighborhood now are looking for mother turtles who come up out of the lake to lay their eggs. Pam trained them to watch where they dig their nest and lay their eggs. Mother turtles can cover their nest up so well that it is very hard to tell that anything happened. Pam and the neighbors mark the spot and then they mark the calendar for the theoretical time that the eggs are to hatch.

Sometimes it is cooler or warmer so you can’t always go by the “normal” time it takes for them to hatch. And sometimes they “over winter”. 

After they are hatched they have what Pam calls (and I’m sure others call it also) a yoke sack. This allows them to not have to eat for a few days. It is stored up energy. 

If you are a regular reader you know that Pam buys worms and raises them for “castings”. So the poor worms get fed to the turtles.

When Pam releases the turtles it is usually into Shipshewana Lake. She says they go out a little distance and stop. They turn around and look at her as if to say “goodbye”. She expects me to believe that.

So if Pam asks you to go clean out a ditch you need to know it is a ruse to look for turtle.

And that is okay.