A Reptile In My Pool

In a previous post, I showed y'all a giant gross bug that I found swimming in my pool. Well, it got worse. This time around, I found a big reptile in my pool.

Nah, I'm just kidding, it wasn't an alligator. That's not my picture, I just found that on the internet. I live in Texas, not Florida. Here the gators only show up in the retention pond at the park where the children are playing on the jungle gym. They're not rude like the gators in Florida who jump in your pool without asking.

No, we found this reptile swimming in our pool.

It seems pretty strange to me to find a turtle in our pool, because our backyard is totally fenced in, and we live a pretty good walk away from the drainage canal, at least a half mile, which is the closest body of water (and a place where turtles are known to hang out).

Turtles aren't the most mobile things in the world, especially on land, and aren't know as fence climbers either, so it seems pretty weird for it to be in our pool.

We fished it out of the pool, and transplanted it to a better spot.

Just a few feet away from our pool is a pond that my wife and I constructed in our yard. It's something we've always wanted, but the pond has never quite made it to a finished state. It's supposed to have a waterfall, but that has always leaked and seeped water all over the place.

The pond has a filter in it to keep it clean, keep the water flowing, and keep it from becoming a mosquito hatchery, but that's the most we've done. It tends to get overgrown with weeds, filled with algae, and, as you can see in the picture, the water plants are a little overgrown as well.

But, it's a pretty natural feeling pond, because of that. So it seemed to be the perfect place to dump the turtle, instead of the chlorine-filled water that would probably kill it. If you look closely, you can see that we put the turtle onto one of the lily pads on the left side of the frame. Actually, it's hard to see, here's a little help:

It got into the pond, and swam down out of sight...which considering how messy the pond is was pretty easy.

I don't know if he liked it there, though, because the next morning, we found it swimming in our pool again. We fished it out again, and put it back in the pond, and since then, it hasn't made a reappearance. Either it decided to stay in the pond and keep out of sight, or it returned to its regular home, climbing back over the fence.

Funny thing is that this isn't the only time a strange animal has been swimming in our pool. Once, the little guy heard splashing in our pool, went outside and found a dog swimming around. We don't own a dog. They helped it out of the pool, and tried to get a look at its collar to send it back to where it belonged, but it dashed off and ran out the gate, disappearing from our lives forever. Weird, huh?