Short but eventful trip to the lake

Jul 3, 20156 min read

Deviation Actions

Published: Jul 3, 2015

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Several years ago a friend of mine passed away. She was very involved in the care and rescue of turtles of all sorts. I inherited a lot of turtle related stuff that I put into a section of my garage, but it quickly got covered up by an avalanche of my wife's ever growing collection of art supplies and equipment. About a month ago my wife, with the help of a couple of her friends, managed to put some order into that section of the garage and Linda's turtle supplies came back up to the surface.

In the supplies were a number of jars of turtle food. Box turtle food I can use, but not the food for aquatic turtles. We then thought of our previous trips out to Busch Wildlife to feed the fish/turtles Cheerios and bread and we decided to do that again, but this time they would be getting something that might even be healthy for them.

When we got to lake #15 there was already a minivan in the gravel parking area. A young Chinese lady (she had just graduated from high school) holding a smart phone approached our car and asked if we knew what the address of the lake was. Her father had locked his keys in the car and they were trying to contact their auto service to send out a locksmith. Her father apparently spoke very little English and though young lady was much better, but her proficiency was clearly being challenged by the situation. Our friend Rita took charge at this point and it was a good thing she did. The knuckleheads at the auto service had no idea how to send out a tech without an exact street address. A lake in the middle of a park does not have a mailing address. Even though they insisted that a tech was on the way and would be there shortly, nothing happened for an hour until the young lady got a call from a tech who had arrived at her house in the next state and couldn't find her. That tech managed to get someone sent in more or less the right direction (at least the right county and state) and the next tech managed to get someplace about 15 minutes away on the first try. If Rita hadn't been there to handle giving the directions they'd have been there all night.

While they were waiting the young lady told Rita that she and her father were in the area because they had gone to see the UMSL college campus. He father was sending her there to get a degree in Accounting. She was not thrilled by this. She confessed to Rita that she hated accounting and she wanted to study photography instead, but apparently, with her father paying the bills, she didn't see any other option

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So anyway, with Rita handling that crisis, my wife and I went out on the dock and started trying to lure in some turtles. But the first to arrive were the bluegills. We should have brought some cheerios to waste first, but then a turtle showed up. Some sort of a slider. Missouri has a lot of water turtle species, so I'm not sure what this was, but it had about an eight inch shell that was covered in moss. It competed with the bluegill and now the catfish as well for the turtle food. Another turtle of about the same size and another smaller one showed up as well. I doubt the turtles got anymore than maybe five percent of the turtle food, but knowing the food chain of the lake, it is likely that it will all be turtle food eventually.

At some point a giant spiny softshell turtle showed up to see what the commotion was all about. I've read that the females' shells can get up to 18 inches long and I suspect this one was about that big. With her head and neck sticking out, she might have been two feet long. She snagged a bit of food but decided it wasn't worth the effort and she sank back down into the depths.

While we were feed the turtles, a couple of children came up and asked if they could feed them too. I gave them some of the food and they were impressed bu the size of some of the catfish that rose up to "vacuum" the surface. The little girl mentioned that near where they were having a picnic, someone had left a bucket of full of live fish. This annoyed me because this was a "no fishing" lake and so it seemed like cheating and wouldn't take any skill at all to pull out a bucket full of fish. And it also annoyed me that they had then just left them there.

I went over to the spot that she indicated and saw that someone had left behind a tackle box and a five gallon bucket. It was clear that the bucket had been sitting there at least all day, and my first thought was that the fish were all dead until i saw the gill of a catfish move. I dumped the bloody bucket out into the water and over half of the fish that had been in it were dead. The catfish and four bluegill appeared to still have some life in them and when I went back to check on them about 30 minutes later they had recovered at least enough to swim away from the shore. The family that was having the picnic washed out the bucket and used it to pickup trash and took the tackle box as well.

So I got rid of the old turtle food. Took a bunch of pictures (i'll post a few here) and brought home a few chigger bites and one tick. Not a bad afternoon.