We had quite the neighborhood gathering on Sunday morning. Leisurely sipping coffee and reading the Sunday newspapers, we noticed a small group of people clustered at the end of our street. As one of them moved to the side, we saw the large dark object in the street that they were all in stop-action and checking out.Being early June and from the size and shape of it, I somehow figured it was probably a snapping turtle and I headed out to join our neighbors in this close-up view of this pre-historic looking creature.
I thought back to several years ago when I was a kid, remembering big female snapping turtles in late springtime arriving in our backyard, just hundreds of feet from the little pond that bordered our property. They looked enormous to me as one by one with their back legs they dug out these deep holes in our yard and proceeded to drop hundreds of eggs into each hole. As I grew older, it eventually sunk in to me in the summers, when we were rowing around in the little pond, merrily, merrily, merrily drifting about with our hands in the same waters, that these BIG snappers lived there too!
Though, we still rowed about diving our hands into the water to catch frogs and never really knowing to fear these big "snapping" creatures.
Life was but a dream.....
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Right away the little 5 year-old boy confirmed my thoughts and called out to me, "Look, it's a dinosaur!"
And, indeed, with its brown scaley tail, the jagged shell, and wrinkly neck, it did seem to look like something out of the ancient times of dinosaurs roaming the Earth.
It was so cool to see it pull up onto its legs as it got up to slowly walk across the road. The legs had backward-looking knees, or elbows, and the turtle waddled ever so slightly from side to side as she walked.
Of course, crossing the road was what everyone was trying to stop her from doing (like we knew better for her?!). We just didn't want to have a car come by and crush her as she returned from laying eggs, or whatever she was doing.
But, no one was quite up for picking her up and carrying her across the road either!
"Watch out! Their necks can stretch all the way around to their tail!" The boy's father claimed as he warned them to stand back.
"Their jaws are like vises, they can clamp shut on you and take off a finger," added another bystander as he poked her with a stick.
"You can tell how old they are by the notches on the back end of their shell." Neighbor Bob the Builder offered his two cents.
"What predators do you think they have...any?" Neighbor Randy piped in.
"I bet something like raccoons can find and eat their eggs, but probably humans and cars nailing them as they try to cross roads is their biggest predator!" I joined in with my thoughts on the matter.
We don't really know these creatures in our lives at all, yet we were all full of ideas as to all sorts of things about them. All of this made me wonder if some of these were indeed true facts, or just some hearsay passed along from generation to generation.
Gonna have to read up on them...but, in the meantime, I'm still not gonna try to pick one up...
they could snap a finger off , you know?!
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Update...
This morning driving in to to work I came upon two school buses stopped with flashers on in the middle of the road, not a house or student nearby. One of the drivers was out in the road poking a stick at a big, dark blob...finally, after waiting a few minutes, a "Brazilian Painter" (that's what it said on the van he jumped out of!), jumped out and picked up the turtle around the widest part of its shell, flipped it on to its back and dropped it. He picked it up again and did the same thing about 3 times, bobbling it across the road, finally landing it on the side in the dirt where it stood up, a bit dazed and started to assess if it was on the right side of the road.
Everyone was in the rush of their morning commute and sped by. I wished her well. Especially if she really wanted to be on the other side of the road...!
3 comments:
I saw one today, here in Oakham - it is indeed the season for egg laying - I've spotted two eastern painted turtles using my new garden plot for their eggs.
We used to have snapping turtles in my neighborhood when I was growing up, too - in Queens, NY, all of about 5 miles from Shea Stadium. There were two man-made lakes from the '39 World's Fair between us and the stadium, and the snappers lived there.
We used to stick branches in front of their noses, hoping they'd bite them off - just like a finger. But mostly they'd just plow ahead, doing their best to ignore the indignities we beset them with.
It's true that they have long necks, but we used to pick them up same as any other turtle, hands around the widest part of their shell. They couldn't reach if you were careful. Picking them up by the tail never seemed like a good idea, though...better to direct traffic than take that risk...
Rick
Janet - I remember an extremely, humongous snapper (at the age of 6/7 anything looks big) that would travel across the little 5 foot wide road that ran between the 2 ponds at the back of camp. Occasionally we would be hiking about the same time she decided to ramble. Needless to say, we had to wait as she did not leave us any room to pass. I just wonder how old she was as we viewed her for many years.
That was the strange looking turtle. Sure looked at Dino blended with Turtle Ninja :)
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