About two years ago we had two turtles that would visit us every day on the back porch. Mostly they came to visit the overripe fruit we would put on the back porch for them to eat. At first we thought we only had one turtle but one day Cody saw two. And he put them in a cardboard box thinking I might want to keep them as pets.

When I started doing research online about what to feed them and what kind of terrarium to get I read an interesting article about how people shouldn’t take the turtles from their backyard and make them into household pets, that it depletes the natural population, and I should only get turtles from the pet store who are specifically bred to be pets. So we put them back on the porch with their tiny turtle brains carrying only a faint memory of their day-long vacation in the cardboard motel.

We could still keep them as wild backyard pets like the birds and lizards. (Someday I’ll get a photo of the roadrunner that eats the lizards off the back wall.)

The idea of a pocket-sized pet still appealed to us though. We really wanted another puppy but knew that with Ms. Spoiled Ridgeback US and three demanding cats it really would be more than we could handle. So we started looking into a smaller pets. One time I looked down at Winter’s hedgehog stuffed chew toy and it inspried me to do a quick search about hedgehogs as pets. Lo there happened to be a hedgehog breeder right here in Albuquerque. Needless to say we were the proud owners of a baby hedgehog within two weeks.

But we would still put fruit out on the porch for the turtles and they kept coming back in the warmer weather. They did their wintering elsewhere. But last year four very large trees in our yard succumbed to disease and we had them removed. As well as a line of large juniper bushes that were well on their way to dying too.

I never saw the turtles last summer and hoped they hadn’t been killed by all the yard and tree guys. But look what I saw on our back porch last friday.

It seems they (or one of them) had a baby. It’s much smaller than the other two - the shell is about the size of the palm of my hand.

I sliced up a mushy nectarine and a few strawberries and took them outside. But Zippy wasn’t after fruit. Zippy was after the dead black beatles from the recent exterminator visit.

Why Zippy you ask? This turtle is pretty fast! Check out the video I made. (click the still below and the movie file will pop up)

This was the first time I tried the video feature on the digital camera so please excuse the shakiness and stuff. I guess this qualifies as backyard pet blogging.

We didn’t get a lot of photos during our trip to the farm in Socorro. We were too busy being hot and trying not to discuss politics and religion. I grabbed a few in the car on the way down. And this one of Winter visiting with teenincy cousin dogs is pretty damn cute too.

We call those her lamb ears.