Last week was my wife’s and daughter’s Spring Breaks, so we drove with the dogs down to the Florida Panhandle, where we stayed in an especially crooked fishing shack hanging over the Aucilla River. From there, it was an easy paddle down to the Gulf of Mexico, complete with old-man’s-beard, leaping mullet, and easily spooked alligators.
I saw this little guy in a display tank at a ranger station in Apalachicola, Florida. To me it was a “fancy slider” (in Michigan you mostly see painted turtles–which tend to be big–and red-eared sliders, which are this guy’s size, but with a smooth shell). But apparently he’s really a Barbour’s map turtle. Like the sliders and painted turtles I’m used to, he has extremely pretty yellow pipping all along his body (which I didn’t even try to capture). What I was really taken with was that spiky shell, and his tiny dignity.
