A HAWKSBILL TURTLE
The common box-turtle of the United States you'll meet in the woods in the evening and early morning, wandering about looking for something to eat. He spends practically all his time on land in Summer; and in the Winter, all his time in bed. As soon as cold weather comes on he digs a hole in the ground, or scoops out a place under some brush, and turns in.
But the box-turtle—he's really a tortoise—is what some of his relatives would call a "landlubber," no doubt, for many of the tortoises who live in the sea rarely leave it; as if they had half a mind to go back and be only flipper people, as the ancestors of both the turtles and the tortoises must have been; since all life is supposed to have begun in the sea.
All the tortoises of temperate regions dig in for the Winter, but one Southern member of the family makes his home in a dugout throughout the year. He's called the "gopher" turtle. The gopher turtles are natives of Florida, and live in pairs in burrows. Other members of the turtle tribe do not pair, but there's one time in their lives when both land and water turtles dig into the soil and that's when they are laying their eggs. The females scoop out hollows with their hind legs, kicking up the dirt, first with one leg and then with the other. But they're as careful of the dirt they dig out as a beaver is when he digs a canal. They scrape it up in a little ridge all around the hole.
What for? Just watch.
HOW MOTHER TURTLE "TAMPS" HER NEST
As soon as she has finished laying her eggs, Mother Turtle carefully scrapes this dirt back over them and tamps it down, much as a foundryman tamps the sand in a mould. You can guess what she uses for a tamper—the under side of her shell, raising and lowering herself on her legs like a Boy Scout taking his morning setting-up exercises in a Summer camp. After that she doesn't pay any more attention to her eggs. She leaves the sun to do her hatching for her. Both land and sea turtles—or, more properly speaking, the tortoises and the turtles—hatch their young in this way. The sea-turtles scramble up out of the water on their flippers, much as a seal does in climbing on a rock, and make their way back from the shore, great crowds of them, at nesting-time, to some stretch of sand, and there lay their eggs. This march of the mother turtles always takes place at night. When the young are hatched they dig their way up through the sand and make for the sea.
[II. The Crab Family]
Another one of the water people who help make land and one that everybody knows, is the crayfish. Every small boy is afraid Mr. Crayfish will catch his little big toe sooner or later, when he goes swimming; although I never heard of a crayfish that did. But they never worry about their toes—the crayfish don't. When they lose a whole foot even—as they often do—it grows right out again. The science people say this is because they belong to a low order in the animal world, but I think it would come in right handy for any of us—this way of regrowing not toe-nails alone, but toes and all—don't you?