At the end of September, turtle eggs hatched and I ended up with numerous common snappers and 3 Western Painted turtle hatchlings. I already posted a video of the snapping turtles.  Here is a video of the Western Painted turtles.

  

 

October 16 2008

 

At the end of June, I collected turtle eggs from nests that had been dug up by raccoons, marked them to keep the same sides up, transported them to a container of soil and let them incubate in my backyard.  From October 4-7, the eggs hatched and I ended up with more than 50 hatchlings. I'm now keeping them in a 75 gallon stock tank in the basement.  Next spring, I'll take them back to the area where the eggs were layed and release the babies.  In the meantime, I can enjoy watching them grow.  Below is a video of the little guys and, as you can see, they really seem to enjoy eating.

 

October 6, 2008

A lot of people have asked me how I make my faux rock.  I made some videos to show the basic technique and have posted them on two pond forums. Maybe it is easier if I just post them here and can refer people to this site.  That way, I hope more people will also take a look at my pond.  Because of the 10 minute limit to videos on YouTube, I've broken the tutorial into six parts.  I hope they are helpful.

Part 1

 

Part 2

 

Part 3

 

Part 4

 

Part 5

 

Part 6

 

 

Los Rancheros is a really good Mexican restaurant in DeKalb, Illinois where we go on a nearly weekly basis.  After seeing my pond project online, the owner asked if I could make a faux rock water feature for the restaurant.  I spent a lot of time this summer designing, experimenting and building the project and installed it a week ago today. If you want to see the project, check out the album in my pictures section.  I chose to use a rigid preformed 50 gallon pond liner purchased from the local Lowe's as the pond basin and built a wood frame around it. The project is composed of 28 individual pieces of lightweight concrete, using styrofoam beads as the aggregate. The pieces are finished with an acrylic latex modified mortar layer and colored with a combination of intergral concrete colorant, concrete acid stain and latex paint hand-applied "speckles" using a splatter technique.  The waterfall has two preformed spillway basins incorporated and surrounded by faux rock. Water is circulated with a 210 gallon per hour pump and there are six underwater lights installed withing the spillway basins and the pond proper. The owner plans to plant vines in the incorporated planter and to put tropical fish in the pond. Mesh bags with mechancal and biological media will be placed in the spillway basins when the fish are added.

 

 

It was a long winter.  This spring I introduced male toads to the turtle aquarium and they began to serenade the female (see "Who Gets the Worm?"). The videos attached are of the males singing in the aquarium.  The noise they made went on all night long. Next morning, all toads went to the pond and 3 days later we had toad eggs.  Eggs hatched, resulting in thousands of tadpoles and, some weeks later, multitudes of toadlets moving out into the neighborhood.