Eric Triplett The Pond Digger here, today we are on a little excursion, we're in Upland California, we're
at the home of Mike LaComb our aquatic plant specialist. Now Mike has a huge
affinity for pond turtles, so I figured what better place to take you since today our
focus is going to be on "The 5 most important things you need to consider
when building habitat for Pond turtles"
Now the pond we're about to checkout is really unique it's about four foot deep,
has a land bridge, multiple levels so there's different areas for the turtles
to hangout, there's multiple waterfalls and the list goes on of the cool things were
about to show. Let's go have a look.
Hey Mike, my god your yard looks insane. Good morning Eric, how are you doing. Excellent, thanks for having us out
today. Oh no problem.
Obviously you know why we're here today, we want to cover the five most important
things that you should consider when building a habitat for turtles and since you got
this awesome habitat I figured now better place to be. Can you tell
us what you done to your yard to keep it secure so that turtles don't take off.
First of all, the only
gate that i have coming into my yard I made sure that it was secured to
about a quarter of an inch gap underneath it
so baby turtles, big turtles can't crawl out
If they can find a way to dig out or crawl under something or even climbed they will.
I never realized turtles can climb as well as they can
until i built all this and had my turtles.
What have you done to your pond to protect them
from predators. Well why don't we come over the bridge here and I'll show you
what i've done.
First of all Eric,
in every part of my pond I've got what
I call turtle tunnels and there places where the turtles can go down and
hide
and also
the ledge doesn't gradually go in like this it drops down really deep, so if
raccoons come over the wall, possums whatever, cats
there deep enough where the predator cannot fish them out and eat them.
So I see these fish swimming up vertically like this, the pond's pretty deep, tell us how deep
it is.
Well actually I've maid it 4 feet deep, because having a small yard like I have
I wanted the most out of my pond so I can get the most turtles, most fish that
I could have.
So four-foot deep, it's not critical to have a 4 foot depth, is it?
No it's not Eric but
the only thing that that's mainly critical is that the turtles have somewhere to
go hide to get away from predators if they need to.
Tell us a little bit about the basking behavior of your turtles, because lot of
people don't realize that the turtles need to climb out of the water and completely
dry off each day, so I noticed you have a lot of spots around your pond for basking.
Well actually there is,
they usually only wanna hang out
anywhere along the edge of the pond where they could slide into the water
really fast in case a predator, hawk,
raccoon or whatever comes to get them, they feel more secure by being on the edge
to be able to slip right in right away.
So they're
more basking like on this stone and not out in this gravel.
Yeah Eric, they go here they go on the rock there, rock over there
um... anywhere where the sun hits right on the edge of the pond
is where they sit out.
See the important thing is, they need to get out of water and dry off
certain times a day, like completely dry
and a lot of ponds don't allow them to climb out, so
do they do that every day, I mean are they always out. Oh yeah, year, that's very important Eric
because if they don't, If they're not able to sit out in the sun and get the
warmth from the day, then it's harder for them to sleep under the water at night
which is what they do,
and they tend to get to cold and then get sick and die.
The topic of basking is important that I wanted to cover, which leads us to the next
topic, is breeding, cause the
female turtles they want lay eggs each season and if they don't, you know, its
probably not good. So tell us what you've done to kinda stimulate the hole breeding thing.
You're going to love this, I went to
all elaborate trouble, to dig
3 foot of the
mound out there and put all sand in there because my thinking was
well that's how the see-turtles do it, so maybe that's how fresh water turtles do it
and uh...
they have laid eggs out there but more than not, I find it they go to other
places of the yard and dig their holes for the nests, and my ground is really hard which
is amazes me, but that's what they do.
So one of the most important things I think you need to consider is a save skimmer, because when they're basking they can evade predators, but when they get sucked up into the skimmer,
Its not pretty, I know. So tell us what you'v done to your skimmer to make it save for the turtles. Year, your right I learned the hard way unfortunately I had one of my turtles go in to my skimmer and actually the pump held him down there and kill him so it was a pretty big bummer, so
I actually made a grate that I put in front of the door to stop them
from being able to go into the skimmer,
that's a very important thing to do, because they will get sucked up. Yeah look
they're always constantly by the skimmer, there is one
swimming away right now, I found that when I feed them the food tends to flow into
the skimmer and they've got really smart and they sit, they hang out right here and wait for the
food to come to them so that they don't have to go out and search for it themselves
so what i did to stop them from going in there is i just made a grate like this
having 2 pumps in there the suction is good enough it just holds it against
there.
It's very important to watch for the debris of this though because it will stop
the water from going into the skimmer
and
the pumps could run dry so that is something to consider when you do something
like this to block the water flow you want to make sure that you
don't restrict it.
So Mike, I know you went through all this elaborate set up of sandy beaches and
it looks really awesome
you did that to stimulate breeding right, have you had
any success with breeding, have you
had any babies?
Actually Eric I have. Last fall when I was
putting the second part of my waterfall on
i came across these 2 little guys right here walking along the walkway in the water
and uh...
it was the end of the season so they must have been the last
eggs that could hatch for the year, but actually I've had 3 all together.
So Mike thanks for having us over today we learned allot of cool stuff, your funny
stories where real cool
you know if i was a turtle I guarantee I wanna live in this backyard because its an
amazing place here. I wanna say thanks and we're gonna cut-out, have a great day.
Thank you Eric.
let's recap those five important things you need to consider when having a pond
designed for turtles
You need to have a tide perimeter
You need to have turtle tunnels, so they can go deep into the pond and hide from predators and
hibernate. You need to have a basking area where they can get out, the basking area is best
when its close to the pond so they can slide right back in if they get nervous or scared
They need a place where they can go and lay some eggs, now Mike went through the elaborat.
beachfront property, they tended to go other places in the yard but you need
to allow them to be able to get out and dig and lay their eggs so the females don't
get egg bound. And the last and most important thing to consider is a safe
skimmer.
You saw how Mike put that grate in front of the skimmer so the turtles didn't get sucked
up in there, and the story about how they just hang out in front of the skimmer and wait
for the food to come to them cause their lazy
those are the five most critical things i think we need to know about turtle pond
construction, I hope it was informative and uh... have a great day.