Here’s looking at you

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I happened to be going through my archives recently and ended up in the year 2007, where I found this picture of a turtle looking at me apprehensively because it wasn’t used to having the front end of a macro lens put so close to its face. My friends Bill Brooks and Tim Cole, who are wise in the ways of things reptilian, told me independently that this is probably a red-eared slider, Trachemys scripta elegans. The turtle kept its head retracted the entire time that I photographed it at Hornsby Bend in southeast Austin on July 26, 2007, so I never got a photo showing extra features that might have clinched the identification.

The turtle was dressed in its usual garb of upper and lower shell plates but it was also fashionably accessorized in duckweed, which is a type of tiny aquatic plant that can sometimes be seen floating in large numbers and forming a covering on the surface of ponds.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman