We had another turtle escapee today, but luckily she wasn’t far away and the dogs found her almost immediately. This resulted in us going over the entire chicken wire enclosure with a fine tooth comb, and by pulling and tugging on everything until we finally found the likely breach. It didn’t seem like we would have overlooked it before, but there were a ton of tall weeds there before that might have both kept the wire ‘closed’ and also prevented us from seeing the potential spot there in the first place. John’s still outside now, threading new wire through everything so its sewn up tight.

The turtles had been doing some digging again, but while Penelope seems fine digging in the enclosure, Myrtle doesn’t seem so satisfied in there and she climbs the chicken wire, although not as much as the third turtle used to. I guess she just found her way through this breach while she was climbing – jeez! According to internet sources, turtles don’t reach ‘egg’ maturity until they are about 5 or 6 years old, and these turtles are about 10 at the very least. In any case, it’s no wonder that when people have younger turtles, you don’t hear about the egg-laying challenges, and then later many people give their turtles away when they get too big. I have a friend who runs a Turtle-Themed online shop whose proceeds go to turtle rescue – I understand a lot more why that would be needed now!