My Daughter's Introduction To A Baby Turtle 🐢

Bzzzz!

I want to tell you about an amazing encounter we had today.
With the onset of the thaw, we started going for walks with my daughter farther and farther away.....

Children are very inquisitive and it is important for them to explore the world by interacting with it. My daughter loves going to the river to squelch the water with a stick, as if she were a fisherman and catching fish. I am very amused by her games in which she imitates characters heard in fairy tales.

While the child found a long stick - a fishing rod and started his favorite business, very close to us in the grass at the water's edge I saw a small turtle. Apparently he had just come out of winter hibernation and found a warm dry place where he basked in the winter sun.

Of course I did not miss the opportunity to introduce the children to each other and watched with curiosity as my child in his tiny hands twisted the small turtle carefully looking at its patterns.

In the palm of my hand, the turtle clearly looks tiny, not at all like it does in children's hands.
I really like the patterns on its shell. It seems to me that they grow like circles on a tree cut, by which you can also count the age. This will probably be the third year of this turtle's life and in the fall each segment of the shell will increase by one more pattern.

I wanted the turtle to stick its limbs out of its shell more so we could get a better look at them, so I decided to throw it in the water near where we found it, but it floated upside down showing us the bottom of its shell. I had to help her flip over.

But even when I turned it over, still the turtle did not show the slightest activity being below the water level.
Perhaps we frightened it, or it had not warmed up enough to become active, but I decided to take it back to the shore, since it refused to swim away from us.

We ended up leaving the turtle basking in the same spot where we found it.
What I liked very much was that the child was not cranky and did not ask to take the animal home with him.

We already had a meeting like this happen last fall.
I heard a rustling in the field at night and thought it was a hedgehog. These prickly animals are common in our area. But it turned out to be an adult large tortoise.

That evening, the child had a good look at an adult turtle and learned to hold it so that his finger did not get into its mouth. We watched the turtle crawl on the carpet and swim in the bathtub.
That same evening we released the turtle back where we found it.
My daughter has a lot of fun contemplating and interacting with living things, which makes me very happy.

Camera Nikon Coolpix W300
Winter 2024 | Ukraine
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And this gif of my ducklings swimming. 🦆

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I wish you all a peaceful sky above your head and stable soil under your feet! Take care of yourself and your loved ones so that we can meet again in the hive!!