Besk wrote:This is really something absolutely cool!
Thank you!
The neighborhood kids just love it. We discovered the neighbors to the left have two kids the same age as my kids, and the new neighbors that moved in on the right have four kids about my kids' age. Neighborhood turtles!
I tried building an external basking area for the big ones but failed. I haven't given up yet, though! Just ... put it to the side for now.
Betty has been basking and hogging the brick I have up there. I didn't mean for them to climb on it because I thought it would be too tall or hurt their shell or something, but there she is.
She was out there when I left for the store last night at 9pm, and was still there when I came back two hours later, so I left the lights on during the night. (When we have the kids around, nobody basks so this gave them one night of uninterrupted basking time.) She was still on the brick at 7am when my husband left for work, and she's been there every time I've checked today. It's almost 1pm now. I'm ok with leaving her there (because I do checks to make sure she's still alive) for as long as she wants to be there, since she has the worst retained scutes out of all of them. I should put more bricks up there and move the ramp up.
Betty is really mellow and unafraid. The only thing she does when I go near her on the basking rock is to look at me and wiggle her legs a little. I know she can get off because I've seen her do it before, so I'm not worried.
I'll put a picture up when I'm not in the middle of boiling pumpkin for pies.
OH, I'm going to make the turtles some "pumpkin pie" - plain, boiled pumpkin in a "shell" made of some lettuce leaves. Tiny turtle pumpkin pies!
(Though I wanted to run that by y'all here before I tried it. I also have some raw pumpkin I could use instead if that's better.)