Its gotta be a rough life!

I’ve always been fascinated with turtles, and have kept many different types over the years. I’ve had many painted turtles, several eastern box turtles, snapping turtles, stinkpot turtles, a spotted turtle, several smooth soft shelled turtles, map turtles and a wood turtle. I even have some pics of me riding a giant tortoise of the Galapagos when I was a wee bairn! Some of my favorite turtles – were Hannibal the desert tortoise owned by Uncle Tony and Aunt Ruth in Palo Alto and my attack box turtle me and Janet had when we lived in Canonsburg Pa. Hannibal was a good sized beast about 30 – 40 lbs had semiprecious stones inlaid in the rim of his shell and was the scourge of aunt Ruth’s backyard flowers in her fenced Palo Alto yard. If memory serves (maybe Joan can help me out here) they didn’t capture him but he came with the house when they bought it. Incidentally the new owners of the house when Tony and Ruth sold knew that the pending sale of the house to them was contingent on Hannibal’s continued garden reign of terror! He was a great beast hibernating in a shallow dug trench during the mild California wet season winters. My other favorite was an eastern box turtle that spent a winter in the bath room of our apartment in Canonsburg. The bathroom was always tight in the morning when both Janet and I were trying to get ready for work. As often was the case Janet was”hogging” the sink so I sic’ed my turtle on her! I told him to savagely bite bite her toe. He immediately sprung into action sprinting to her foot as she brushed her teeth and hair and… Let us just say it took a while for him to cross the three feet to her foot. Then he stopped, cocked his head,  took precise aim, opened his fierce jaw and bit her on the little toe! I shit you not! It was the only time he exhibited aggressive tendencies! It was fucking fantastic! It also is one of the incidents that Janet cites as evidence of me being a witch! Anyway I digress, suffice to say I love turtles.

Over the several years (more than I would like to count here) that I have been fishing the Grassy River and Gowganda area I have seen very few turtles. Its too far north and the climate is just too difficult for them I guess. I have perhaps only seen under a dozen or so. All eastern  painted turtles. It was one of my disappointments with the area when I first travelled there after fishing the extremely turtle replete kawartha’s. Most of the turtles I have seen were in the Grassy River area and even in a specific area. That area being the landing on the Grassy River that I use to go to Mond Lake. I went there this early summer with Phil Poczik and regaled him on the way there about the turtles that lived in this tough area and their yearly attempt to lay eggs in the hardscrabble of the roadway to the landing. Phil told me later that he was thinking to him self, “Yeah right, another one of Jack’s stories”.

We put the boat in and travelled to Mond for a delightful day of fishing in the sun catching many pike, several walleye, some perch and drinking some beer. When we pulled into the landing lo and behold there were two count ‘em two female painted turtles trying to lay eggs on the road way to the landing. “Geesh,” Phil thought, “I guess Jack isn’t full of shit after all (at least on this point).”

I got a picture of one of the hardy girls, and also took a picture of one of the 7 or more failed nest sites. Shown below.

You can see from the picture how difficult the digging is here and the scattered shells of the eaten turtle eggs. I felt so bad for these intrepid pioneers, that I resolved, the next time I ventured to Mond I would do something about this situation and began cogitation of the problem.

Some interesting background on northern painted turtles – they can live to over 100 years old, have almost zero mortality once they reach adult size, typically have population sex ratios of 12 to 20 females to every male, hatch-lings  spend the entire winter in the shell hatching out the next spring and are the highest vertebrate species that can go through a complete death defying freeze and reanimate! They can only do it once in the egg though. All in all it sounds pretty good eh? I wouldn’t mind being a painted turtle!

So later in the season I prevailed on Buss (notorious GOP apologist and all around good guy in-spite of it) and Andy to trek to Mond for a fishing trip and to renovate the egg laying grounds for the turtles. We took a pick shovels and a galvanized wash tub with us in addition to our fishing equipment and boats. After a long day of fishing we dug several ~ 1/2 cubic yard holes on the sites of past failed turtle nests and then collected sand from a nearby area tamping it into the holes. I can hardly wait to see if this helps the little devils out. In any case this may be counted as part of our good works and perhaps merit someone (perhaps turtles) placing small pebbles on our tombstones.

“Joe the fucking plumber”.

Why don’t we hear more about George the idiot war criminal or Dick the son of a bitch war profiteer 0r John the doddering tool of the corporatocracy or Sarah the idiot window dressing trash talking barbie doll (who incidentally exhibits that primary genetic GOP trait of abusing her power)?

Janet made a very cogent observation the other day – “Why is it that the republicans must have at least one idiot on each ticket?” Hmmmm I though – this is an insightful point! It was Ronald the idiot with the elder Bush, it was Quail the idiot with the elder Bush, its W the idiot with Dick the puppet-master, now its Sarah the idiot with John the doddering fool. Why is it that the idiots all insist that its nookuler instead of nuclear – hey its derived from nucleus (assholes) not nookulus! I think the “idiot factor” is a conscious GOP attempt to devalue the presidency and to convince the great redneck idiot unwashed that even an idiot like you could be president. I am also sick of hearing that bullshit of “I am not voting for Obama cause he’ll just be assassinated.” What a ridiculous notion, its tantamount to saying, “Hey, I’ll fuck myself and the middle class because I don’t want the best candidate to possibly be the target of some crazy assed redneck NRA racist trying to kill that Black (use N word here) Ayrab islamic terrorist in the whaaaht haas!” I don’t care if the democrats had put up a 10″ long slimy banana slug against the republican I would vote against the blood sucking republicans. Even if the NRA ads said (erroneously) that said banana slug was gonna take away mah guuns!!!! Yeah, the red-necks get to keep their guns but the republicans have eroded their constitutional rights to privacy, search and seizure etc so badly that you better have at least one gun with a round in the chamber in your house because if the government gets a bug up its ass about you you’ll need it to blow your brains out when they come for you. Its either that or they’ll keep you locked up for years and torture you. Its the modern day inquisition. I am also sick of hearing about the black effect where – the polls say that Obama is ahead because people don’t like to appear racist to the pollsters but will act in a completely racist manner when actually voting. Yeah great! People should be encouraged to exercise their imaginary friend given right to exhibit their basest urges in the voting booth! It also plows the ground for massive voter fraud by the GOP so they can then cite the latent racism of the electorate as the reason for the disparity between the exit polls and the fucking GOP rigged election results. I am also really sick of hearing about redneck Republicans protesting early voting! I realise its much harder to steal an election if everyone has a chance to vote but hey, the republican apparatchics are smart . They’ll figure some way of stealing the election with the new electronic voting machines. Don’t worry about it. All the conservative owners of the voting machine manufacturers have to do is some minor electronic tweeking to convert Democratic votes to republican votes. The beauty of it is that there is no “messy paper trail”. The GOP won’t even have to resort to the conservatively constructionist Suckpreme Court to rig on the election in their favor. And another thing, whats all this about the socialist dirty word? The republicans have fucked up the banking and finance systems so badly that even they have to admit that the only real effective fix is to socialize it? If this socialism is such a bad fucking thing why is it so good now? Why is Sarah the idiot calling Obama a socialist like its a bad thing? Yeah right! I hope he’s a socialist! Call him a socialist again Idiot Barbie!

 Well my fingers are getting tired pounding the key board and I am hoarse screaming at the TV – Dammit I wish I were back at camp! Oh yeah by the way I closed up camp and am back home. I’ll be writing a couple of blogs I didn’t get to this summer with pictures from up north. One will be about the painted turtles of the grassy.

I miss heading out to visit Pat and Carol in New Mexico and fishing for high-country trout and drinking too much but I am looking forward to my sister and Ryan’s Halloween party and visiting Hogfish Jim’s, and what the hell, I’m gonna play some pool tonight – might even drink some beer. That should settle me down a little.