Turtles and Wright’s Pond
I had to get out of the house today with the kids. Even though it was threatening rain, we decided to take a walk in the woods. We often go to the Middlesex Fells Reservation and today we decided to walk around Wright’s Pond in Medford. This is a great little jewel of a pond hidden behind Elm Street near the Malden/Stoneham line. The road noise from Route 93 is a little loud in the fall and winter, but we still really enjoyed ourselves. Best of all, we ran into this little guy - an Eastern Painted Turtle. It was clearly used to people as we got up and close to it.
This one is mostly about the photos, folks. This is a picture of Wright’s Pond taken from the far end on the Spot Pond Reservoir side looking back over towards the beach area. We walked all around the pond today and although the trail was a little slippery in places, it wasn’t too muddy and there wasn’t a lot of trash on the ground.
A bit blurry, I know, but it was quite overcast today and this guy was moving around. But the color - spectacular. What a pretty turtle.
Despite walking by with both kids, this turtle seemed pretty acclimated to humans. Eventually, though, it decided to split and here you can see it trying to swim under a log to get back into the pond proper. We encountered the turtle in a little feeder stream about 30 feet or so from the actual water’s edge. Ironically, Wright’s Pond is man-made, so this feeder stream was originally just a run-off or a gully.
Back at the beach, there were leaves everywhere. We stopped to play in the playground a little. That’s across the beach from these picnic tables.
Leaves everywhere. Did I say that already?
