Company for the weekend

My furry friend and weekend company,  found a hard shelled garden intruder which terrified him. That led to a quite funny five minutes following the discovery. He made approaches from the front, side and back flanks to try to investigate the creature safely. Following lots of barking, bouncing, and posturing it all worked out without any bloodshed. This turtle is the fourth different turtle that has turned up here in the last month and a half. Pretty amazing to me, who knew? Obviously I live in some sort of divine turtle habitat. In my whole long life I don't think I have come upon four wild land turtles. Here I have had four different encounters of land turtles in the last month and a half, and in  addition to that, I have had at least four more aquatic turtle encounters. All in all a pretty cool turn of events. You couldn't plan that! Each turtle has been so different it has been difficult to identify the species, and I can't say that I have done it successfully. 

This turtle has lots of diamond back type striping on its shell, previous ones I have seen have had embossed patterning on the shell.  I am about to go on a hunt for info about this turtle. Any concrete information anyone. All knowledgeable help would be most appreciated. I believe this is an aquatic turtle because it climbed up a cliff from the water to the prescipice where we found it, or I should say he found it. Maybe it is a Diamondback Terrapin searching to lay some eggs, but I am not yet sure of that. There was a tunnel moulded through the tall grass, following the trail the turtle followed until discovery.  I called off the dog, left the turtle where found, and returned within a few minutes to find that the turtle vanished.  A happy ending in my book!