While cutting the grass... we came upon a Painted Turtle... nearly right on top of her! Luckily we found her before our mower's blades did!

I was just about ready to get off the mower and move this turtle to one of our garden ponds... then I noticed that this turtle was using it's back feet to push away the dirt.

This was a Momma Turtle getting ready to lay eggs! Wow... what an adventure to find in our yard!

I marked the area where the turtle was... I knew that once she was done laying the eggs... she would cover the ground making it impossible to see where she had once been. We continued to check back (from a distance) to see how things were going.

Once Momma Turtle started to move around... we went closer. She was busy covering her eggs. In this photo you can see there were at least 5 eggs. They weren't buried very deep... maybe 2 inches. We'll keep an eye on the egg nest to see if anything happens.

Turtle eggs take about 75 days to hatch... oh my!

A baby turtle will tear away at the egg shell until he can get out. The yolk sac is attached to the baby turtle. The yolk sac provides nutrition.

It wasn't easy to capture a photo of this lil' guy... we'd get too close to the pond... and "splash" down under the water he would go! We sat for a long time, just waiting for him to come to the top of the water!

The momma turle that had laid the eggs continues to live in our garden pond. Prior to finding momma turtle, we did mow over a turtle... he wasn't harmed... the blade nicked the top of his shell (this is how we can tell the two larger turtles apart from each other)... he lives in the garden pond too. Now with the baby... we can watch 3 turtles live in a natural habitat setting. It will be fun to keep an eye on the baby turtle.