Thanks guys! (As always) excellent insight.
Any stress I’m Having over it is directly correlated with the fact that I know I’m stressing her out. Because then (good ol’ ridiculous anxious me) I think “I’m gonna stress her out, it’ll cause her to hold her egg and get egg bound. I’m stressing her out and having to wrangle her... it could break an egg inside her.” You know, so on and so forth. It sucks having to try and do it myself but if I knew it wasn’t stressing her out, I’d just suck it up and do it no matter how difficult she makes it. But as it is, trying to keep it as low key for her as possible, I’m having someone else help me hold her so I can do the stuff as quickly as possible.
As for the pond; they’ve gotten in it but it was stupid brief. Like I figured a duck would totally prefer a big beautiful pond over a bunch of mud puddles. But watching them... they freakin LOOOOOOVE their mud puddles. And in Indiana, we’re having flooding issues so there’s puh-lenty of water standing mud around here.
I too suggested snappers to my husband and momma (hubs helping me hold her while I assess the new baby demon den of doom and my mom because I wanted my momma LOL) they said the same thing I said: it’s 100% possible that a snapper could’ve done it but we seem a little intrigued by the fact that the holes are just so perfectly rounded. Plus (and not that this would necessarily prevent anything) the wounds’ locations would’ve meant the snapper would’ve come up near/through/past the legs and duck tootsies. I’ve heard (back in my BYC stalking) that snappers will grab hold of a ducks appendage and then swim straight down, drowning the duck and/or causing pretty bad damage to the surviving duckies.
A relative and I are doing snapper recon for good measure (oddly, that started before this whole hole problem) because I hate snappers, I’ve got a 9 year old daughter and that I intend to have my ducks in the pond and want extra safety. To be blunt; I didn’t even bother looking at ordinances/laws on “peaceful termination” of the snappers because I was just being ... well, a bully.
And yes I too would quite frankly prefer a little surgery to get in there, see wth that blackness is, know the extent of internal blackness’ location as well as making sure she’s just suitably healed.
Just sortve sucks that I have no idea how much something like that will cost; basically whether it’s in my budget. But! I just received the fruits of my labor of filing taxes so I have a pinch of extra money and I can use that to pay for it.
I, like you guys, am just stupid eager/anxious/excited, etc., about finding out what in the supernatural, intergalactic heck is this stuff!?
But I am 1000000% a nosy person (and have zero qualms admitting same) and just won’t be able to ‘rest’ in the matter until I know what it was (the black hardness... the cause of the holes may never be confirmed).
In summation: snapper turtles are buttholes, I told my stepdad that he had full, uninhibited authorization to make snapper soup (lol but it was also made expressively clear that there’s zero frog giggin or duck hunting going on at property
)
I’ll be calling Monday for appt. I will try and do a full once over and report back on (heavens forbid) any additional findings.
