Traversing both the north- and south-bound lanes of Interstate 91 is an achievement for a turtle, particularly an irascible thirty-pound snapping turtle whose sense of appropriate timing had been impaired: it was mid-afternoon on the first day of the July fourth weekend.
I stopped the car and realized that her westward progress would soon be impeded by a fence beyond the tall grass in front of her. I retrieved the turtle, fearing that a return trip across the interstate would prove fatal. I picked her up by her long, spiny tail, held her at arm’s length (the only safe way to carry a snapper), and placed her on the floor of the front seat of the car.
I drove home and released the turtle in my front yard. My dog learned quickly that the safest way to approach a snapping turtle is from the rear. Each time the dog advanced, the turtle rose on her hind legs, leaned forward so that her head hugged the ground, quickly pivoted, and thrust her neck nine inches beyond the edge of her shell. Mouth agape, she struck with the speed of a rattlesnake. The two maintained a safe distance.
I have met people who claim snappers can bite broom handles in half. Although they have been known to bite the legs off ducks, severing broom handles is a turtle tall tale. I also found an old reference book that claimed that snapping turtles, after clamping their jaws on their victims, are unwilling or unable to let go until sundown or until a volley of thunder rips the heavens. As is often the case with large, formidable creatures, we tend to endow them with attributes far beyond reason.
Despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary, the turtle is ferocious only when searching for a nest site or when removed from water. Even large turtles that have been fighting fiercely on land quiet down when placed in water and will attempt to swim away rather than stand their ground. Summer bathers have nothing to fear from snapping turtles, which remain docile even if stepped on.
The submissive reaction of a submerged snapper to people, however, does not extend to other animals. Snapping turtles are voracious predators and scavengers, and consume legions of aquatic animals, mostly fish and frogs. Snapping turtles, Chelydra serpentina, are the largest freshwater turtles in New England and the most common and widely distributed turtle in North America.
My turtle had been looking for sandy soil in which to lay her eggs when I found her crossing I-91. The warmer the weather, the faster the embryos develop. Under favorable conditions, the average clutch of eggs requires between twelve and sixteen weeks to hatch. If this spring is any indication of summer trends, snapping turtle embryos are going to be developing slowly.
To predict the sex of a snapping turtle egg, you need a thermometer. The temperature of the nest, two-thirds of the way through the nine to twelve weeks of incubation, determines an embryo’s sex: eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit or hotter produces females; eighty degrees Fahrenheit or cooler produces males. In between, either sex may develop. Since eggs at the top of the nest are warmer than those at the bottom, mostly females hatch from the top and mostly males hatch from the bottom. Somehow this arrangement produces a balance of males and females, for snapping turtles have been around for a long time. Relics from the Mesozoic era – the age of dinosaurs – they are among the most primitive of living reptiles.
After watching the turtle worry my dog, I retrieved the snapper from the front yard and drove her to a nearby lake – a snapping turtle haven of local renown. I released her into the marsh and marked her progress by the rattling cattails. Submerged, she plowed through a jungle of water lily stems, pulling the flowers below the surface, an amphibious tank, ancient, misunderstood, but purposeful.
Then one morning in early July, I secured my kayak on the car, drove to the lake, and parked where a brook enters a culvert and passes under the road. The flood plain is flat and sandy. Three feet off the road, a snapping turtle was digging her nest, a mere scrape in the sand. As I stretched motionless in the grass, the nonchalant mother turtle methodically laid 27 round, white, leathery eggs – one at a time, at three to four minute intervals. Her pebble-sized brain was fixed on the task; her primal yellow eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking. After each egg dropped into the nest, she delicately positioned it with her long-clawed hind feet. When she was finished, before she turned around, she covered her work with sand, packed it solid with her feet, then lumbered back to the brook, never to see those eggs again.
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