Monday, May 10, 2010

The snapping turtles...
















...do not understand why everybody is so upset about the flood. I made my first trip back to the lake this morning since the big rain, and saw three large specimens, all apparently delighted with the mud and high water. Insofar as it is possible for reptiles to have facial expressions, they looked very smug. One of them was lolling next to the beaver lodge, which seemed to be vacant. The lodge is intact, but it's clear that the lake rose well above the top of it during the flood, and I didn't hear the usual early morning trilling from inside. No sign of the colony in the water or on the shore, either. Hope they survived. As I stood by the lodge, a little phoebe perched in a cedar tree right next to me and sang like mad, as if to fill the silence.


Photo by Matt Reinbold from Wikimedia commons.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

A lovely little haiku of an update. Thanks.

La Bonne Vivante said...

I have always loved snapping turtles. They are so prehistoric, and they don't take any crap! Lovely post, thank you--nature will prevail over us, for sure, in the end. For me, floods sometimes function as a message of hope in our overhumanized world!

Julie H. Rose said...

La Bonne Vivante - I recommend reading "The World Without Us."

Your blogs seem even more beautiful than ever. Maybe it's me. Perhaps it's the flooding. No matter.

Glad you are unscathed.

Village Books said...

Lovely photo! And turtles so seldom get any breaks - maybe they deserve this one...