thank you, the enclosures are forever projects....... the turtle is a female blanding's.... like the eastern's they come with a variety of shell patterns
about a month ago a lot of my eastern box turtles got out, i was finding them for 2 weeks..... i wasn't entirely sure how many there were, i kept thinking 17..... today fo some reason every turtle in my yard was out, and i counted 17 box turtles, so it looks like i found everybody.......
i had a couple brush piles, i moved them and found 2, found one in a fence corner and one in the garage 2 weeks later, my dog found i believe 4, he didn't hurt any of them, he had them by the back door, it was obvious they were in his mouth...... i watch him sometimes now, i think he's still looking for more......
gabe likes watching the turtles, luckily he wasn't like any of my other dogs, they all liked watching..... any other i had would have at best chewed on them, at worst eaten them..........
the turtle below also got found by one of my dogs, he got lucky, i've had few that didn't....... in case anybody can't tell, the turtle is entirely missing his marginal scute's a large portion of the front vertebral scute, and a good amount of two pleural scute's.........what can't be seen is the missing parts of the plastron, which is also significant......