June eggs. Last week, a friend called to request information about a turtle that was digging a hole on a sunny path in her yard. She wondered what kind of turtle it was, and why was it digging a hole.

Because her land is near the Delaware River in Long Eddy, and because the turtle was about a foot long and “primitive looking,” we decided it was a female snapping turtle. The “snapper” had climbed from the river to locate a sunny well-drained place to lay about 30 little eggs.

Soon after, I called Kathy Michell, who rehabilitates injured reptiles and amphibians at her home in Narrowsburg. Kathy agreed with these theories, and added that the first two weeks of June “have been major egg laying weeks” for turtles. Because of the cool spring, many species have been very late in laying their eggs.

Unlike frog and salamander eggs, which are embedded in a jelly-like matrix and usually laid in water, turtles’ eggs are deposited in chambers in well-drained soil. Their shells are less rigid than chicken eggs and are incubated as the summer sun warms the soil around their chambers. Kathy expects the eggs in my friend’s yard to hatch “toward the end of August or the beginning of September, or maybe earlier if it gets warm and dry.”

In the meantime, Edie is protecting the egg chamber with fencing that won’t shade it. I’ll write more about this next week.

Wetlands. Don’t forget the program about constructing backyard wetlands, hosted by the Delaware Highlands Conservancy in Milanville, PA on Saturday, June 28 at 10:00 a.m. For more information call 570/729-7053.