42nd Post

Gretel before...

...and after

41st Post

The new house has been finished since November, we've been in for over 6 months now. The turtle pond is going very slowly though despite the time passing. It's a formal pond design with raised walls & a single step bridge over the centre. To either side in the large square sections will be a basking island with planting & sand/stones (shown as a square and at each of the 4 rectangular offshoots will be fountains (not shown).




To keep the turtles in I'm basically using a vertical wall with a decent gap from the waterline to the top edge of the pond. Experiments with my best climbing turtle has so far seen it not make a 10cm jump up, but I'll either double this to be sure else tile the waterline so there's limited grip. Until I'm certain they can't escape, I'll fence the outside perimeter of the garden bed.

To keep the toads out is also within the vertical wall design. Toads are selective breeders and prefer still water with shallow banks & limited surrounding vegetation- more like a dam or even road side drain. This pond will have thick surrounding vegetation & no banks, plus a 40cm external wall. I'm sure the odd high jumping large toad will get in, but they're too big for the turtles to eat & be poisoned. And should (heaven forbid) 2 get in and lay eggs, I'm confident the current of the filters will suck up any of the poisonous eggs before they could be eaten.




These progress photos are from my building blog, & more detail on the construction is shown there. http://aqua-blog-building.blogspot.com/search/label/Pond




The foundations are 30cm deep & well reinforced. Though the pond won't be deep it has a weak point at the bridge so we needed it to be able to function as a monolithic structure pretty much!




The fondations also held the upright reinforcing for the block work. This will support the vertical walls from the horizontal pressure of the weight of the water.




The blocks themselves are H blocks, designed to be core filled & also allow for horizontal reinforcing to fit within each row. So at this stage there is a continues band of reinforcing rod around the perimeter of the structure, + all the uprights. Once the concrete is in it will be very strong.

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Freddy above, Lincoln below.

The turtles are up at the new house in heated tanks & troughs for the winter. The big ugly blue pond was leaking too much from grass roots destroying the liner, & yet again 1 turtle (Lincoln) decided to develop an ulcer on it's back foot- so because the pond is no where close to finished a winter in luxury heat it is. This is Fiddy & Ninja's 3rd winter in, Freddy & Lincoln were out last year and brumated but I think in retrospect they were too young, as they look like rough old war veterans now not the shiny tank specimens they used to be.

So here is Fiddy & Ninja. Both looking skinny too, obviously have not been chasing (& catching) the 6 million platys they have to eat.

Ninja's eye patches are almost gone now too, the faint remains are all that's left.

Since moving from Cairns I've rehomed 3 turtles that had outgrown their tanks, 1 shown in this blog previously, + another 2 shown below.

This lad above has the most divine claws.

I've moved on the first 2 of them to friends as they were males, & kept the one above which is female. Fiddy & Freddy look to also be females, & Lincoln & Ninja are now the 2 remianing males. so at present there are 5 turtles! I'm now looking at only keeping females, but the thought of parting with Ninja is not going down well just yet. Being juvenile still there is a chance it could yet be a girl, bit young to say for sure but looking male at this stage.

Seeing how differently they have all grown is amazing. What you feed and how often makes such a huge difference. My Fiddy & Ninja look like runts compared to all the rehomes bar the 3rd female I've kept who is about 5 & had previously been living in an old concrete swimming pool!

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Yet another snake spied, this time out from the patio door. On close inspection it turns out it had a frog.

It was somewhat put off by my interrupting it's meal to take a photo, and so it spat out the frog. The frog then hopped off happily.

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The new dog Gretel. A silver & black miniature schnauzer.

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Some pics of flowers from around the new block.

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The bees I ordered a few months ago have come from here. They are Trigona carbonaria, the most common type around here, & supposedly the easiest to keep. Here is a close up (obviously not my photography). They are very small & also sting-less, so will be great for the kids to have around.

I've set them up in an area that will be a garden bed disguising our HSTP at the new house. They need to face North-East, and need shade by 10am, so this limited where we could actually locate them.

In a massive anti-climax, I let them out at dawn, but none came out before I left for work at 6am. Returning home from work at dusk, they were either all back in, or never came out... they're in there though.

This is another pic I didn't take, that a fellow nature blogger took when they opened their hive. As you can see nothing like a normal honey bee hive.

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A little bit to update from the last month. The possum box may now be home to a nesting pair of pale headed rosellas. But I've not caught them on camera, only exiting very quickly when ever I'm near. Apparently though they may visit a nest a few hundred times before deciding if they'll nest there, so nothing is certain.

The breeding tank I set up bred- about 50 or so little platies. They are growing slowly though so a while off being turtle dinner. The snails have also bred, that is no real surprise though.

I found this in the garden, a small piece of what looks like some very brown snake skin. It was a good 2m long but fell to pieces as I tried to photograph it. The mummy snake of the baby I found perhaps?

Finally, the 2 bigger turtles have come out of brumation & been moved into a bigger pond along with the smaller 2. It's a 3m rubber lined wading pool with metal sides, half filled.

As you can see it's all function & no beauty. I can't wait to build the proper pond at the new house, where aesthetics will be the primary consideration.

The turtles love it all the same, they bask on the concrete paver all the time, and there are floating weeds, native mosquito fish and mosquito wrigglers to chase.

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I have re-homed another turtle that had outgrown it's tank. Now to decide where to actually put it...

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A Yabby farm. This design was described on the AFT forums so I've copied it as best I can. It was a family affair, Nina was in charge of tyre wrangling. We got an given a scrap 4WD tyre from the local tyre shop.

In an unseen, well shaded part of the yard (between a water tank & garden shed) we laid the tyre over some plastic left over from the concreters doing our build next door. Enough to fully cover the ground below the tyre then more to fold up over & make a lid of sorts.

Then the centre of the tyre was filled with river sand. Fiona found this most amusing & was keen to just jump in & play in it.

After a trim of the excess plastic, then a wipe over to remove the dirt, the tyre was filled with water & the centre sand was also dampened. This made it as respectable as a tyre filled with sand & water then covered in plastic could ever get.

The yabbies were from the pet shop up the road. 10 were purchased, 4 littlies went straight to the turtles. Six big ones were kept for the farm experiment.

This one is a male. The last pair of legs before the tail have pointy out bits on the joint closest to the body. The link above words it as "reproductive or genital papillae of the male crayfish are short projections on the bases of the last pair of walking legs".

This is a female, no pointy out bits as mentioned above & a dot at the base of each of the 3rd legs up from the tail. This one is regrowing one of those legs. The link above words it as "oval openings on the bases of the third-last pair of legs".

Here is a diagram for my own future reference because I'll forget soon enough.

After inspection they were released where they quickly trotted off into the water at the sides. Some vegetables & fish pellets where thrown in & the lid was closed.

The kind person who shared the design says it works well. Cost was nothing, up keep should be flushing out the water if it dirties & throwing in vegetables periodically. The theory is that the tyre keeps them warm & insulated, the sand offers them opportunity to hide from one another, the plastic bottom stops them burrowing to freedom, & the cover keeps them relaxed & not worried about being eaten...

32nd Post

I've set up the breeding tank for turtle food again. It's got platies instead of guppies this time, as they are a bit bigger, slower, easier to see... but breed just as profusely. There's also 4 different types of snails in there, rams horn, cone, common pond again & now mystery snails. The turtles are bound to enjoy them all. I've also got some plants, what's left of the plants they didn't pig out on when I 1st got them anyway.

I went walking at the local reserve to take photos, but my camera focus played up so I didn't get any decent pics! This reserve is at the end of my street and goes for quite a few KMs following a creek. There are platypuses, kolas, heaps of goannas etc, not that I saw any this time.

Once home from my unsuccessful photography outing, I did something unusual & read the manual! I have bought a macro lens finally & turns out I had the camera on the wrong setting totally. So once that issue was sorted, I managed to get the following...

31st Post

Not too much going on, the building & winter is scaring everything but the birds into hiding.

This is a nice pic of a honey eater. Nice because it was a fair way a way & I still manged to get the camera to focus.

Fiddy & Ninja are still enjoying the coldest part of winter in the tank.

Fredrick & Lincoln however are still in the freezing pond. They've stopped eating completely now but still bask some days. I grabbed them out for a check up as I had to drain the entire pond to remove all their uneaten food. I attended to a few scratches they had & then took this pic to try & have them sexed on the turtle site I've previously mentioned. To me they are both looking decidedly girl like.

Also suffering in the cold, this little frog was evicted from under a daisy bush by a garden hose. I took it inside to check it was OK then let it go on a different plant in a warmer more sheltered part of the garden.