Wild Life / snapping turtle

how to pick one up and other life lessons

Hello, friends — It’s July 1! Say “rabbit, rabbit” and get the good luck. It’s full-summer and feels like it, green and hazy, humid, everything a-buzz. It’s time to slow down and sit on a log. So here’s my ode to snapping turtles, to the slow moving beasts that can show us the way. — Amy Jean

Once years ago I was driving up the busy road near our home and watched an enormous snapping turtle take up a good part of the shoulder, like a small man on a bike. The road runs alongside a reservoir and so I’m sure the turtle was finding its way home after some slow excursion. In that moment, the road belonged to the turtle and to its steady prehistoric pace.

Usually I only see the little ones making their dangerous ways across roads in June, looking for nice spots to lay eggs. I’ll stop and pick them up if I can and take them in the direction they are going. I like the warmth of their shell and their ornery hissing. I appreciate their stubborn fortitude, their insistence on following their own path.

In early June this year, one emerged from the pond near where I work and made her way to a corner of the building, to where she could go no further, and scraped up a good spot for her eggs. It looked like hard work. Once her job was complete, she shuffled some dirt over the top and went back to the pond, no bother.

Every afternoon we look at the dirt patch she left and wonder what’s happening. There could be fifty turtle eggs in there. It could be a couple of months before any of the hatchlings emerge, maybe longer. Maybe never if a predator finds them. Apparently hatchlings are known to make sounds before they leave the nest. We will listen for their clicking if we can. It’s the least we can do.

In the winter, the big ones live under the ice burrowing into the mud. They can get by with only a breath in six months, getting oxygen through a truly crazy gas exchange. The rest of the year they prefer to hide in the shallows, sticking their little nostrils above the water. They can live to be nearly 100.

Oh small godzillas! The earth is full of surprises. Life runs on many different but complimentary intervals of time. Slow and steady is for summer.

---

Snapping turtle links—

• VERY IMPORTANT INFO: the only how-to-pick-up-a-snapping-turtle video you’ll ever need [via CT Fish and Wildlife Instagram]. The look on the turtle’s face is everything.

• I always enjoy Grace Evans’s newsletter, and she writes about turtles and turtle soup here: “Turtles: ‘they are a great treat’”— !

Animal encounters in recent comments—

• Sandra watched a teeny spider brace itself against the wind on a long stem. A rose-breasted grosbeak flew in close to another reader, while scrub jays in Oregon have trained a friend to give them peanuts—lots of fun encounters, thank you to everyone! As always, please send in your small stories I would love to hear.

Also—

• My friendly snapping turtle drawing is for sale. Some of the proceeds will go to the Turtle Conservancy.

---

Wild Life #52 / this monthly newsletter is a place to learn about the life around us, one snappy turtle at a time. I do this because I’m not sure what to do about the millions of species in danger of extinction. It means something to see and enjoy the life around us. Thanks for being there!