Turtle Encounter

On Friday afternoon  Mr. Trouble on Feet and I drove to Hartley Nature Center to pick up The Banana and Mr. Sneaky Pants from their afternoon classes (which they loved).  I parked the car and happened to look over at the start to one of the hiking trails and saw a mysterious object.  At first I thought it might be a really big rock, but it was such a strange color.  Within a few steps, I confirmed my suspicion that it could be a turtle.  What a turtle it was!  It was a huge female snapping turtle, and she was acting a little bit unusual, hanging around a certain spot on the hiking trail and not moving very fast, even though a crowd of people was accumulating.  A snapping turtle can move quite quickly when it wants to, someone remarked, and I certainly believed them.

All the kids from the nature classes stopped by the trail with their parents on the way back out to the parking lot, and a couple of the teachers came to to observe, too.  The turtle was a large female, and she was preparing to lay her eggs.   In the middle of the hiking trail.  I suppose that’s better than the middle of the parking lot, which is where on of the teachers said she laid them last year, but still!  The infant mortality rate for turtles is just sad, isn’t it? I know that the lack of parenting instincts in reptiles is countered by special features that allow them to lay gagillions of eggs at a time and how female snapping turtles can store sperm inside of them for years in case they need it, but all those deceased baby turtles still makes me melancholy.

However, it was really fun to get to see such a big turtle up close, not in an aquarium.  My kidlets were very excited, and we watched longer than everyone else, climbed a few trees, and then came back to watch some more. You can’t see them on the pictures, but there were even a few slugs catching a ride on the snapping turtle!  Isn’t her face beautiful? I think her name should be Hilda.

I really hate snakes.  I am deathly afraid of snakes, in fact.  I don’t have warm fuzzy feelings about pretty much any other reptile either, but I really do appreciate turtles.  I was so glad I had thrown my camera into my bag before we left home.  We actually saw another small painted turtle in the middle of a different hiking path at Hartley that day too, but I didn’t manage to capture that one with my camera because it really did move fast when it saw me.