{"id":12624,"date":"2013-04-21T23:09:22","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T04:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/?p=12624"},"modified":"2013-04-21T23:09:22","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T04:09:22","slug":"turtle-mating-begins-on-massachusetts-southcoast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/?p=12624","title":{"rendered":"Turtle Mating Begins on Massachusetts SouthCoast"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Five-Year-Old Male Painted Turtle<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

It’s Sunday night, April 21st, and the temperature reads 33 F, one degree above freezing in this seemingly endless transition from winter to spring in the Great White North.\u00c2\u00a0 Today, although bathed in sunlight, never broke out of the 40s with a chilled north wind.\u00c2\u00a0 Despite these conditions, certain wetland turtle species have decided enough is enough, and they’re proceeding directly to spring mating … with or without the cooperation of Mother Nature.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Two Male Spotted Turtles @ SouthCoast Bog<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

We visited an abandoned SouthCoast cranberry bog mid-morning.\u00c2\u00a0 The sun shined brightly and a small chorus of spring peepers\u00c2\u00a0chirped plaintive calls for love.\u00c2\u00a0 The past two weeks we found several female spotted turtles in the shallow bog channels where local spotteds\u00c2\u00a0travel annually for a mating aggregation.\u00c2\u00a0 This morning we found the first two male spotted turtles of the year at the site; a sure sign that the mating part of the annual\u00c2\u00a0aggregation was about to commence.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Young Male Painted Turtle Caught in the Act<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

We returned to the bog in the afternoon.\u00c2\u00a0 This time we observed a young male painted turtle and a mature female in mating behavior and we captured the male in flagrante delicto.\u00c2\u00a0 The female was discrete enough to disappear under muck and debris at the bottom of the channel.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Five-Year-Old Male Painted Turtle<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

We don’t often see painted turtles young enough to age like this ~ five-year-old male.\u00c2\u00a0 Annual growth\u00c2\u00a0lines quickly disappear.\u00c2\u00a0 The lines on this specimen very barely discernible.\u00c2\u00a0 As for his gender,\u00c2\u00a0this turtle’s\u00c2\u00a0extremely long claws and thick, long tail clearly marked\u00c2\u00a0him as a male painted.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course these morphological features merely confirmed the activity we witnessed with his mature female companion.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five-Year-Old Male Painted Turtle It’s Sunday night, April 21st, and the temperature reads 33 F, one degree above freezing in this seemingly endless transition from winter to spring in the Great White North.\u00c2\u00a0 Today, although bathed in sunlight, never broke out of the 40s with a chilled north wind.\u00c2\u00a0 Despite these conditions, certain wetland turtle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12624"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12624"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12651,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12624\/revisions\/12651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}