Tortoise eggs hatching.

 

September 10. 

I can find no trace of the tortoise-eggs of June 18, though there is no trace of their having been disturbed by skunks. They must have been hatched earlier.

C. says he saw a painted tortoise a third grown, with a freshly killed minnow in his mouth as long as himself, eating it.

Thinking over the tortoises, I gave these names: rough tortoise, scented ditto, vermilion (rainbow, rail?), yellow box, black box, and yellow-spotted.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 10, 1855

I can find no trace of the tortoise-eggs of June 18. See June 18, 1855 ("At 3 P. M., as I walk up the bank by the Hemlocks, I see a painted tortoise just beginning its hole; . . . I stoop down over it, and, to my surprise, after a slight pause it proceeds in its work, directly under and within eighteen inches of my face.") see also June 11, 1858 ("Looking carefully to see where the ground had been recently disturbed, I dug with my hand and could directly feel the passage to the eggs, and so discovered two or three nests with their large and long eggs, – five eggs in one of them.").; June 12, 1860 ("At this moment these turtles are on their way inland to lay their eggs all over the State, warily drawing in their heads and waiting when you come by."); June 16, 1858 (“I see a yellow-spotted turtle digging its hole at mid afternoon, but, like the last of this species I saw, it changed its place after I saw it, and I did not get an egg; it is so wary.”); June 18, 1858 ("I find a young Emys insculpta, apparently going to lay, though she had not dug a hole. It was four and a quarter inches long by three and a half wide, and altogether the handsomest turtle of this species, if not of any, that I have ever seen."); August 26, 1854 ("I am convinced that there must be an irresistible necessity for mud turtles.”); August 28, 1856 ("I open the painted tortoise nest of June 10th, and find a young turtle partly out of his shell. . . .What's a summer? Time for a turtle's eggs to hatch. So is the turtle developed, fitted to endure, for he outlives twenty French dynasties. One turtle knows several Napoleons. ") September 9, 1854 ("Thus the earth is the mother of all creatures.”); And also see A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,The Musk Turtle (Sternothaerus odoratus ); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,the Wood Turtle (Emys insculpta); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,The Yellow-Spotted Turtle (Emys guttata); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)