They have just migrated into your area. Box Turtles are pretty docile creatures and are no threat to your yard. What attracts them is a source of water and food. Box Turtles will eat anything. When they are young they prefer insects such as caterpillars, slow-moving beetles, millipedes, centipedes, sow bugs, slugs and snails. They also will eat road kill, small rodents such as mice, voles or shrews, baby birds, snakes, lizards and eggs. As they get older, they will add more plant material to their diet such as roots and berries. They also need a source of water for drinking and laying eggs in moist sand. They are entrenched creatures and are adapted to the area in which they are born, and removing them even a half mile from their territory will mean that the turtle is then unlikely to survive. If you move them they will try to come back and die trying if they fail.

Jan, Last night I saw one more adult Colorado Potato Beetle on a potato plant, and I left it for Mr. (or Ms.) Turtle. I hope he or she found it and ate it. I rely heavily (almost entirely) on beneficial birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects to control pest insects in my garden. It works. I know it works. Sometimes it is very hard--even exceptionally hard--to be be patient and wait for the process to work, but I really do try. Here's another example of how I didn't wait, and then regretted it. I overwintered some potted angel's trumpets (both brugmansias and angel trumpets) in my barn/garage last winter. It was the first time I'd overwintered them there, having previously kept them either inside (but there's too many for that now, and they are too big) or by overwintering them in the tornado shelter in a dormant state. It stayed warm enough here this past winter that the angel's trumpets remained leafed out, although a couple of them dropped some leaves when we when down to 18 degrees a couple of nights, but then leafed right out again. A lot of them kept blooming into December and January and others started blooming in February. Every morning (unless it was very cold), I'd open the garage door and let the sunshine come in, or I'd drag them out into the sunshine. One day in Feb. or earliest March, I noticed one plant was covered in aphids. Since I assumed lady bugs were still hibernating because it was still pretty chilly, I sprayed the plant with neem oil. (I did look for lady bugs and didn't find any on any of the angel's trumpets before I sprayed.) The neem oil took care of almost all the aphids. Two days later a mama lady bug showed up, and within a couple of days we had lady bug larvae everywhere. So, you see, if I had been patient for a day or two longer, the lady bugs would have shown up and I wouldn't have had to spray the neem oil. I really need to work on being more patient. I'll try to write later today or tonight when I come inside from the garden about how to attract more beneficial insects to your garden, and why you'd want them there. I need to hurry up and get outside now before it is too hot to be productive out there. You also can search this forum by typing "beneficial insects" into the search box and read old threads too. I know I've written about beneficials a gazillion times. Dawn

Absolutely. Leaf-footed bugs are not your friend. If you learn to recognize and kill them while they're young, they won't live long enough to do a lot of damage in your garden. I'm going to link a page that has a photo of the immature leaf-footed bugs in the center near the top of the page. When you see a bunch of little bugs like that clustered together, they generally are leaf-footed bug nymphs and you're doing your garden plants, especially tomato fruit, a big favor by killing them all. If you see a similar-looking bug that is alone on a plant, that usually is the nymph of an assassin bug/wheel bug that is beneficial. I always leave the lone ones alone because they're the beneficial ones, but I kill the ones I find in clusters. Usually I start seeing the wheel bug and assassin bug nymphs in May, but I usually don't see leaf-footed bug nymphs until June (or even July in a really good year, and this was not a really good year). With pests like squash bugs, stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs, I try to kill all the young ones I see early in the season in order to keep their population growth slowed down. Stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are incredibly damaging to tomato fruit, and you know what a tomato maniac I am. I'll share my garden space with lots of pest insects and leave most of them alone, knowing the good garden helpers like toads, frogs, lizards, birds and beneficial insects will get them, but I never miss a chance to kill a squash bug, stink bug or leaf-footed bug. Leaf-Footed Bug Info

Hi Sheryl! No, I haven't. I didn't know the monitoring program existed. I wonder if mine would 'count' since they are captive bred? Three of them were found in the neighborhood and given to me and even those were someone's pets that had escaped, because they were very tame, Two of them walked up to my mother's back porch (she lived a block away) and knowing I like critters she called me. Another was found walking down the street by a neighbor. That one I call "Dent Back" because she has a dent in shell. Interestingly, "Dent Back" must be a bit of an escape artist because disppeared from my care for about a year and then was found on the street a couple of blocks over. But someone had obviously kept her as pet during that time because after I got her back she wanted to be hand fed and would bit me on the toe if I didn't feed her fast enough ... LOL. Thank goodness she finally learned to eat off the ground again. If I knew who had had her I would have returned her as they obviously loved her enough to hand feed her. They each have their own little personality quirks and prefereces for different kinds of fruit, etc., and are more intelligent then you'd think. One researcher found they did as well as rats in remembering how to find food in a maze. They were just slower. Sheryl, I finally got to read the article you wrote about garden spiders in the San Antonio Express News and it was excellent. Sheryl's blog: Window on a Texas Wildscape