TURTLE VIDEO!!!!

A few days ago, as I walked around our neighborhood, I was startled by the sound of something entering the water in the pond near our house.  I looked and saw a giant turtle slowly descending into the depths.  "Man, just missed him", I thought.  Little did I know it was a mere foreshadowing of what was to come...

The Volo Bog is only a few miles from our house, but somehow, in all the years we've lived here, I had never gone hiking there.  So today, on a cloudy, chilly day in June, I went.  It was beautiful, lush, green, forest-y, with literally no one else on the trail.  And towards the end of the hike, I was rewarded with.. you guessed it... a giant turtle!  I captured over seven minutes of heart-stopping Glorious Turtle Footage!  Yes, over seven minutes!

Without too much further ado, here is the video.  It's best viewed in a large format, so I won't embed it here, but link to it instead.  Enjoy the turtle.  And the crickets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvzKjfp5XHU

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Wild Kingdom

Spring has officially come a close, astronomically speaking. Here are some noteworthy events from the season past:

We were eating dinner one evening, looking out the bay window, when a small fox trotted out from the side of our house. We'd seen him once or twice before, always disappearing around the front of our neighbor's house. This time he stuck his head into the neighbor's wood pile and came out with a big egg in his mouth. He took it to the opposite end of our yard, buried it among some flowers, and went right back to the wood pile for another egg. This one he buried in the yard across the street and then came back for egg number 3, which went in a different neighbor's yard. He went back and forth, burying eggs in various yards (I think we wound up with 3 in our yard). We counted 10 eggs in all. At this point Wendy connected a few dots and remembered we always see a duck with about 10 ducklings in the pond each year. Probably not this year, we thought! It turns out we did still see a mama duck with 9 or 10 ducklings this year, so who knows if they were duck eggs the fox found.

Another annual event we always see is the migration of a giant turtle across our yard. Apparently she lays eggs in a neighbor's back yard (not one of the same ones the fox buried eggs in), and then in a painstakingly slow process, migrates back to the pond, always across our yard. And somehow we manage to see her every spring. The neighbor always comes out when she gets close to the road and shepherds her across. This year I shot some action-packed, jaw-dropping video of the event:

Finally, we bought some patio furniture a few days ago, and today spent part of the afternoon sitting out on our deck reading (and playing Nintendo DS). This is something we never considered doing with our old deck, so I take it as a positive sign that our home improvement projects are headed in the right direction.

Turtle Power!

In the past month my mom and Joy each had a chance to visit us. Their trips were separated by three weeks and nearly sixty degrees: Mom came at the beginning of March and got to experience temps in the 20s and dangerous blowing snow; Joy came at the end of March when the high almost hit 80.

While we were giving Joy a tour of the area we drove by the McHenry dam and noticed that the Fox River was unusually high. This morning Wendy and I went back to take some pictures and go for our first hike of the season.


To give you some perspective, the trees in the next two pictures are not usually under water.




As we were walking, we kept noticing more and more turtles out sunning themselves on logs. We started to keep count and literally came up with over 100 turtles!










There were lots of beautiful dark clouds racing across the sky during our hike. It turned out to be good timing; later in the day it turned windy, cold, and rainy.