Baby Turtle Cam - ECHO Leahy Center, Vermont, USA

These tiny turtles, each one about the size of a coin, paddle around a pebbly basking platform at the ECHO Leahy Center in Burlington, Vermont, right on the shore of Lake Champlain. They're eastern spiny softshell and northern map turtles, two species that need all the help they can get in Vermont.

Many were rescued from nests dug up by predators, or hatched too late in the year to survive a cold winter outside, so instead they spend the winter here, warm and well fed, as part of a "head-start" program.

Then each June they go back into Lake Champlain, which runs for more than 100 miles (160 km) between Vermont and New York and just reaches into Quebec, bigger, stronger and with a much better chance of making it.

Did You Know? Spiny softshell turtles don’t have a hard shell. Theirs is covered in leathery skin that lets them absorb oxygen from the water, and they can hide buried in sand with just their snorkel-like snout poking out.

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