Welcome back everyone to

to one thousand one heroes legends histories podcast this is your host the one

one heroes heroes podcast this is your host John Haggadorn

well it's August here in southeast Virginia it's been hot and humid here as it is every summer

but this one just seems harder than previous ones.

It's also turtle nesting time here in our neighborhood.

We have a nice pond in the middle of the neighborhood, complete with fish and turtles, our houses across the street from the pond.

During the years we've lived here, we'll occasionally find baby turtles in the backyard.

They're about the size of a 50 cent piece,

maybe a little larger.

Two years ago we had the treat of watching a mama turtle

and these are green-backed pond turtles,

digging a hole in the soft earth in our garden area and

depositing her eggs there.

Having finished that task, she covered it all up neatly and then headed back across the

street to the pond. A few days later we were enjoying a Saturday

afternoon on the deck with our grown kids when I mentioned the incident to them. Now I'm not a born

southerner but somewhere along the way here in Virginia, I was told that those green back turtles are called coaters, so I had no reason to give them any other name.

But as I explained that a big green cter chose our yard to bury her eggs, they started laughing.

Hilarity, which only increased, when in defense, I looked up the word couter and read this description.

Couters are some loving creatures that spend much of the day basking on logs at the edges of ponds, lakes, and rivers in the southeastern United States.

At the first sign of danger, they slip into the water to escape.

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