I ran into this photo shortly after publishing Turtle Time and wanted to set the record straight. Turns out we took pictures of the same turtle in 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.

I try not to get too worked up over what’s happening outside my neighborhood, but it’s hard to ignore the cruelty and corruption in Washington and the wars in Israel and Ukraine.

So I distract myself with what Bob calls “World Class Puttering.” Here he is yesterday on the business end of a shovel, digging a deep hole for a Fringe Tree from Rachel’s Native Plants. I took that photo before hanging our bed sheets on the line, after which I dug all the mondo grass from our pond garden.

When our chores turn onerous, we seek diversions from the natural world. It’s an especially good day when the box turtles return for the summer.

Her legs are dotted with yellow scales against a rusty background and when I caught up to her, I took note of the rainy cascade on her pleural scutes—six little clouds and a burst of rain on the scute in the middle of her right side.

Okay, here’s some turtle vocabulary:
Carapace: the top shell
Plastron: the bottom shell
Scutes: shell sections or scales
Vertebral Scutes: scales along the topline of the carapace
Plueral Scutes: scales along the side

Based on that pattern, I named her Rain and began looking for pictures from other years. The first time we saw her was in 2022, determined to cross through the chicken wire into our garden.

We learned how to tell Rain’s sex from the internet. Females have flat plastrons, and males have a little hollow in theirs. That slightly conclave shell helps him stay aboard when mating. Nature thinks of everything!

Rain isn’t huge, but our neighbor David Harris, an avid turtler, guesses she may be upwards of forty years old. He writes about his turtles at A Turtle For Every Log.

Other turtles have visited Trouts Farm over the years, and we usually catch them in our camera lens. In 2020, I photographed two turtles that I have not seen since. I gave them names so that I can recognize them if they return.

Comet’s pattern is similar to Rain’s, with more of a starburst vibe. We didn’t turn them over to look for a divot.

Zip has a disturbing lip line. It looks like someone sewed their lips shut. Both Comet and Zip have a bright dotted line along their topline.

2023 was a big year. Another dotted-line turtle showed up on July 1st.

I named it Tiger because its shell is so colorful.

And then we spotted a third turtle towards the end of July who clearly had business with Rain. I named him Leopard for his bold pattern, and because he was less stripy than Tiger.

I hope to see more turtles and plan on looking at their undersides. I used to worry about scaring them off with too much handling, but Rain keeps coming back, so I’m going for it.

We easily lose ourselves in outdoor work, surrounded by birdcalls and the scent of the tea roses, the sweet William, and now the Fringe Tree. I sometimes make it until noon without a glance at my newsletters, which makes for a healthy, sane life.

After I finish this post, I plan on pruning our azaleas and cleaning out the rain barrel. And when I see Rain moving around our yard, I’ll take a nature break to watch and wonder what she’s thinking or about to do next.

Bird Walk, January 26

Agusto arrived at Mariposa at 6:00 AM on our first morning in Cayo. He walked the short distance from his house and we went looking for birds. During our walk we talked about the people we knew in common, people we’d worked with twenty-five years ago and others in the area.

Although I kept track of which bird species we saw or heard, I was not able to match this little yellow bird to anything on my list until Deb Ragno identified it as a female Summer Tanager. Deb’s daughter is married to our nephew, so that makes her family.

The morning was abloom with new life, and we were transported back in time to this place as if we’d never left.

Yikes! Bob got into poisonwood while clearing bush in the ’90s, and ended up with a fever and oozing sores that took over his legs and kept him out of the saddle for weeks.

Like many large hardwoods, this Nargusta has a shallow root system accompanied by buttresses which help keep it upright.

Bay Leaf palms (Sabal mauritiiformis) are good for thatching roofs and should be harvested when the moon is full because that’s when they are heaviest with the sap that keeps them water tight and repels critters.

We paused to enjoy the view from Mariposa’s fire tower deck.

And watch Black-faced grosbeaks feeding on yellow flowers.

We saw a lot of impressive vines which made me think of the Tarzan rope swing in the back lot behind my childhood home.

Epiphytes all around.

Medicine Trail, January 29

Agusto told us he was one of Mariposa’s first employees and that he helped clear the trails around the property.

Our Medicine Trail guide, Josh, had intimate knowledge of local plant medicine from a lifetime of living close to nature.

An aromatherapy tree! We burn copal resin at home.

Camille keeps notes. She is dutiful that way.

The broadleaf rainforest is the most beautiful ecosystem on earth, bursting with oxygen and crawling with life. I felt extremely calm after hanging out here for five days, and it occurred to me that I may be experiencing seasonal food and shelter anxiety from living so far north of the equator.

I nicknamed this little plant the Rehab Plant because Josh said it will cure substance dependency.

Ahhh, the beautifully wretched strangler fig. It climbs a tree and sucks it dead, growing stronger by the year as its host slowly declines.

Delicate flowers draped in fairy vines. From sturdy to fanciful, we find it all here in the forest.

A baby orchid, so eager for life that it barely waits to root before setting on leaves and a pseudobulb.

At some point, I was so immersed in the beauty around me, I wasn’t even interested in the medicine. It was enough to know that no matter what ailed me, I could find someone who knew the cure and where to find it.

This is how we’ve been entertaining ourselves in isolation during our customary southern summer heatwave: we stalk the wildlife around our house, and on the weekends we go to the parks in search of more of that nature thing.

We come by our new hobby honestly. My father was a professional photographer, and Bob has a long history of exercising his photographer’s eye.

I was getting a bale of wheat straw out of our storage shed when I came across a two-foot snake. Of course, I ran for Bob, afraid that I’d found a copperhead. He obligingly dropped what he was working on and came outside to assure me it was only a young black snake digesting lunch.

I tried not to imagine the animal inside the snake but quickly lost that battle.

It reminded me of the snake drawings in The Little Prince. If you haven’t read the book, this is a picture of a boa constrictor that has eaten an elephant. My Nana gave me a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s masterpiece when I was about ten years old. This little boy, the prince, went on an adventure and met a great array of individuals. Every chapter held a lesson and I read the book religiously well into my teens. I was especially fond of the little prince’s encounter with the fox. Here is their farewell:
“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The red rocket dianthus in our kitchen garden is a moth magnet. These are a Snowberry Clearwing and a White-lined Sphinx.

One of our favorite subjects: a bullfrog. As soon as they hear the front door open, they dive into the pond, so we shoot them through the window.

Yin yang frogs on a lily pad, so cute!

A white-headed House finch sits with its more colorful partner after bathing in the birdbath. We can only figure that this bird was born without pigment.

Hungry Mockingbird nestlings in the Asian pear tree.

A Dragonfly on the Bengal Tiger Canna and a blue darner on the Autumn Joy Sedum

A box turtle munching on lunch in the shade of a garden tote.

A cottontail looking inside from outside our front fence.

We went to Chatham Beverage District so Bob could pick up Fair Game’s mail and spooked a rabbit. It’s cool how their eyes are engineered to see behind them as they run. It only takes one look from us with our close-set predator eyes to make a prey animal jump and run.

I love the blue herons with their yellow eyes and pragmatic stateliness.

But I have to admit that I am also captivated by the sheer improbable ungainliness of the vultures.

There have been precious few butterflies this year. Here is a Red Admiral on some thistle at Jordan Lake

I love how the bee is carrying its legs in a little twist, probably because it has just changed directions. Bees usually seem purposeful in flight, and it hadn’t occurred to me that they need to make adjustments to avoid running into butterflies. Only, this bee seems to be turning towards the admiral.

A pollen-laden bee on echinacea at Debbie Roos’s pollinator garden up at the Jordan Lake Dam visitor center.

A bluebird sits on a piece of big art in the North Carolina Museum of Art Park.

A female Ruby-throated hummingbird works a red canna bloom.

Finally, a squirrel sits atop our Bradford pear stump eating something that isn’t one of our orchard pears. Punks.

Nature isn’t for everyone. When we first moved to Oahu in 1999, I landed the receptionist job at a pharmaceutical company. Bob and I knew not one soul on the island, so I clung to the conversations with my new co-workers. Every Monday morning, one sweet lady would kindly ask me how my weekend had been and I’d tell her about our hikes and wildlife encounters. I was so excited to have someone to talk to that I ignored her puzzled looks. After several weeks of this little dance, she rocked back on her stilettos and smiled. “Ahhh, you’re into that nature thing!” She had figured me out.