Snapping Turtles

I came across this little snapping turtle bathing in a tire-track mud puddle in the rain. Wherever it had been walking to, the baby turtle had found a wet, comfortable place to rest.

Although tiny, the little creature displayed all the feistiness that its grown parents are known for. It stuck its neck out and raised its head to better do battle with any marauding seagull, raccoon or camera lens that may come too close.

Snapping turtles have always fascinated me and any encounter I’ve had with them sticks in my memory.

~ ~ ~

I remember snorkeling at my parent’s cottage one weekend, a long time ago, when I was a teenager. I had been following a largemouth bass that hung around in the shadow of the dock.

The bass swam in front of me, staying always just a few inches in front of my outstretched hands as I would frog-kick and glide behind it; the fish as curious about me, it seemed, as I was of it. The bass gradually swam deeper in the green water, and I with it, until we were both near the smooth boulders at the bottom. The bottom sloped away from the granite wall of the lakeshore and then ended at a ledge where it fell off into dark, murky depths.

As we neared the bottom of the shallows, the bass stopped swimming for a moment and then shot away at a right angle, in a trajectory that curved back toward the dock. I turned my head to watch it go.

When my eyes came back to rest on the lake bottom in front of me, one of the smooth, heavy rocks seemed to angle itself slightly, to change its position. This must have been some distortion of the glass in the mask I was wearing, I thought, or an effect of the refracted light patterns that the sun makes through the water.

Suddenly the bottom of the lake grew a long neck and head that jutted out straight at me. Beak-like jaws opened wide just inches from my outstretched fingers. Startled, I gasped slightly, taking in a little water, and quickly pulled my elbows back in to my sides, recoiling my hands into fists. Then I allowed my body to float upwards, slowly at first in the downward pressure of the depth, then faster as I ascended. I didn’t move a muscle to swim but allowed myself simply to float up in the water as gently as a leaf floats down from a tree.

One thing I knew from growing up in the country is that abrupt movements frighten animals. Frightened animals can turn defensive and attack. As I slowly ascended, my eyes never left the boulder that sprouted the long neck and gaping mouth.

Clawed feet emerged from what I now recognized as a big turtle shell, bigger in the magnification of the mask perhaps, than it actually was. It couldn’t have been as big as I remember it. It seemed enormous; as big in memory as a loggerhead sea turtle.

I watched as the turtle shortened its neck, pulling in its head, then slid forward from its resting place among the rocks. Spurts of silty muck raised behind it as it pushed itself along the bottom to the edge of the drop off, looking like some kind of prehistoric, armour-plated dinosaur. It followed the ledge for a moment then went over and down into the dark of deep water.

That was my first encounter with a snapping turtle.

~ ~ ~

Walking out of the park one evening this May, I could see a lump that looked like a grey grocery bag full of trash on the road up ahead. In the fading light I couldn’t make out what it was; but I could see that it wasn’t moving and was afraid that, if it wasn’t trash, then perhaps it was something that had died there.

Drawing closer, the lump began to take shape. It was a snapping turtle, with a shell of about a foot long, and it was carrying a spade-full of soil in a clump on its back; the kind of silty soil you’d be likely to find if you were digging up an old marsh at the edge of a pond. The clump was stuck to its shell near the front of the carapace and had bits of decayed vegetation poking out of it.

I wondered if that clump had been there since it came out of hibernation. ‘At the rate he’s moving he’s not likely to shake it off,’ I thought.

I lay down on the asphalt to get a turtle-eye view of the scene and to snap some pics and noticed that he was quite docile for a snapping turtle. There was no jutting out of the head and no opening of the jaws in a threat display.

‘Probably because I’m keeping well back from it,’ I thought. And I was reminded of the time when my wife (then fiancé) and I stopped traffic to carry a snapping turtle, much bigger than this one, off of a two lane highway up north.

We wanted to get it off the road, away from traffic, and into the marsh it had been trying to cross to. But the turtle was not appreciative of our kindness and spent a good deal of effort trying to prevent us from doing so.

Grasping the back of its shell, I lifted its hind end as you would lift a wheelbarrow; a wheelbarrow that had a long neck that craned its head back and powerful jaws trying to bite you as you carried it. We walked it slowly forward on its front legs, finally making it to the far side of the road.

Of course here, on this park road, there was no traffic to bother a turtle and no newly-engaged, bride-to-be nearby to impress either; so I let the turtle be and stood up. Bidding the turtle a good night, I brushed the sandy road-dust off my pants and continued on my way.