We’ve a swimming buddy for a few years, who shares the biological pool with us. His name is Anton and he appeared spontaneously a few years ago. It is a juvenile Iberian pond turtle (Mauremys leprosa) that has chosen our biological pool as a habitat to live.

During spring, summer and throughout autumn it is present. Strangely, during the winter he is not. We don’t know if he hides or prefers to live somewhere else. In comparison, the turtles that live on the river that crosses the village of our municipality are always present. We managed to observe them on winter days when they look for very sunny places to warm up. But Anton prefers a clandestine life at this cooler time of year.

And suddenly, from one day to the next, late spring, he’s there again. He comes back and we don’t know from where. At first we just notice the noise, when he launches himself into the water as we pass close to the bank. From the noise it is known that it cannot be a frog, from the sound it makes it must be something bigger and less elegant. We were therefore attentive and always observed the banks before opening the door of the house. Turtles are very shy and have a flight distance of several tens of meters!

From the windows we can observe his laps, during many hours of the day when he becomes king of the pool. He is swimming from one bank to another, diving or floating on the surface. Sometimes you can just see the tip of his nose penetrating the surface of the water. If we go into the water, he normally prefers to hide from us, but sometimes he passes us in the pool by coincidence and it seems, if we are in the water, he is much less shy. Maybe he doesn’t know how to distinguish us as human beings, because during swimming he only sees our heads.

Either way, we consider “our” Anton a beautiful gift of nature. The biological pool already enchants, but it enchants even more.

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