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My Turtles
These are my turtles here at the Ornate Bird Garden:
- Osiris, a male ornate box turtle (Terrapene ornata ornata)
- Horus, a female ornate box turtle
- Potscrubber, a female three-toed box turtle (Terrapene carolina triunguis)
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 Male Ornate Box Turtle: Osiris
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I got my first turtle in 2001 when I heard a coworker talking about how fascinating it was to see hers roaming across her back lawn. I bought a colorful Eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina) from a pet shop, and lost it the same day. I had no idea what escape artists they are! The little guy squeezed under a small gap in the gate in my side yard and I never saw him again.
I patched up all possible escape routes, and went to a reptile shop for another turtle. I came home with Osiris, an ornate box turtle described as a “big male.” However, ornates are one of the smaller box-turtle species. After looking at the male ornates of friends and neighbors, I came to see that my Osiris is actually a very small male even for an ornate.
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Female Ornate Box Turtle: Horus
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Unfortunately, he is also cursed with an aggressive personality. When I briefly had four bigger male ornates (which I inherited from a neighbor in 2005), Osiris’s obnoxious behavior towards them would get him bit on the face every day. His worst offense was running out, and defending the water dish against the other males anytime they approached for a drink or a soak. (It’s amazing how fast turtles can move when they want to!) I relocated the four bigger males with a good friend, and now Osiris is the ONLY male in my yard.
Also in 2001, I rescued a very small female ornate Horus from a pet store of clueless employees who thought she had a vitamin deficiency. It turned out she had a staph infection, probably acquired during the ordeal she experienced getting poached from the wilderness for the pet trade. I got her treated with antibiotics at the vet, and she’s been in perfect health ever since.
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Female Three-toed Box Turtle: Potscrubber
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In the summer of 2007, I ran across a large female three-toed box turtle Potscrubber while out walking in the neighborhood. The poor thing had escaped her back yard and wandered into the street, probably searching for water. A young guy going to work on his bicycle had kindly stopped and helped her into the yard across the street. I rushed up and lifted her out of his hands because there was no way that I planned to let her roam back into the street or fall into the hands of some snotty-nosed kids.
I believe Potscrubber came from the back yard of a house whose family had moved out. She has chew-marks on her shell (visible in the photo) so she’d probably had to deal with dogs. At first I didn’t know what she was: just that she wasn’t an ornate or an Eastern box turtle. When I took her from the young guy, she closed up both front and back sides of her plastron, so I knew she had to be a box turtle.
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 Little Horus & giant Potscrubber
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Later, I Googled and identified her through photos of three-toed box turtles. Potscrubber is a giant compared to my little ornates: she weighs close to 800 grams! (Just for comparison, Osiris is in his mid-300s and little Horus is barely 280!) Note Potscrubber’s solid-brown color in the photo as compared to Horus’s stripes.
As is typical of three-toed box turtles, Potscrubber is very gentle and good-natured. My ornates are a desert/prairie species whose range covers the American southwestern desert. Three-toed box turtles, however, come from a more lower-midwestern area with higher humidity (think Missouri and eastern Texas) so I provide Potscrubber with a lot of cool mud and water to soak in plus plastic buckets filled with a moist soil-and-grass-clippings mix.
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