Are you turtle-y enough?

This evening Paul and I walked up to check on our newly planted garden. As we were getting ready to walk back down to the house, we noticed a rather large snapping turtle in the grass. Paul was concerned about it raiding the garden, so he attempted to roll it back down the hill toward the pond with a pair of post hole diggers. I was surprised to see it such a ways from the water and stepped forward to see what it was doing.

Turns out it was a lady turtle, and she had climbed out of the pond to lay her eggs. She had laid quite a few of them down into a tight little hole. It was very interesting to see, and something I had never seen before. The eggs are quite small, a little smaller than ping-pong balls which they resembled. We took one egg from the nest to check it out. The shell isn't hard like a chicken's egg shell, but is kind of leathery. She seemed to be making her way back towards the nest when we left her alone. I felt bad for disturbing her on her nest, but then again, we really don't need a whole new slew of snappers heading into the pond. She was quite a biggie herself--close to a foot and a half across her back and a big strong jaw. They have a lightning quick bite, but don't really move terribly fast as long as you are out of range of their immediate bite area.