65 thoughts on “Don’t mess with snapping turtles”

  2. Have always had lots of snapping turtles here at our place. Should not mess around with them. They get big and could most likely bite a finger right off.

    1. People don’t realize how far out their neck can come out. I don’t even try to pick them up from the back as they can whip their face right around and get you.

        1. deceptively quick

          Is there any point to being quick and not being deceptive about it? Surely most of the advantage that getting from A to B rapidly grants you is by getting to B before you are expected to be there?

    2. I knew a fellow in high school who was missing his right index finger. He was telling his little sister to stay away from that end of the turtle—-then pointed at it.

    1. I’d have made it 2-0. I had no idea turtles (or rather tortoises in the UK) could do that!

      1. The video almost seems to suggest the turtle jumped at the observer. They can’t do THAT.

        They’re just snappy turtles — otherwise they have the usual turtle abilities. Quicker neck extension maybe, but still just a few inches. The do snap and snap at any perceived threat.

        1. Yes, I assumed the video was a fake when I saw it, because it certainly looks like the turtle jumps at him… but maybe that’s an illusion from his startled motion of the camera… need to go frame by frame I guess.

        2. They can’t do THAT.

          Oh, yes they can. I tried to help one across the road and ended up on my ass trying to evade it. Its neck is the length of its body and it can jump at least that far.

          1. Agreed; I’ve worked with many turtle/tortoise species, and snapping turtles can certainly use their legs to propel them in a fast lunging jump of about a body’s length. Dangerous critters! (They can’t do it repeatedly, so you won’t see them bounding across a field like a gamboling lamb with razors on its face, but that one lunge might be all it needs to getcha.)

            If you really want to see a turtle *run* amazingly fast, search YouTube for any of the “softshell turtle running” videos. Their speed will shock you!

          2. ” …a gamboling lamb with razors on its face..”
            Thanks for that image. Now I won’t be able to sleep tonight.

        1. Someone who can’t count to 21 without risking arrest for indecent exposure?

  7. Having lived where snapping turtles are not uncommon, I’ve always had a healthy respect for them (and teasing animals is just mean). One time, I saw a large one in the middle of the road, so I pulled off and carefully picked it up by the sides of its shell kind of closer to the back feet (since they can extend their necks and flip their heads upside down to bite above their shells almost halfway back). So while I was carrying it – it was covered with leeches – it was flipping its head back and trying to bite me and scraping at my fingers with its back foot claws. And then it peed all over me – boy, did THAT ever stink! No good deed goes unpunished…

    1. My dad did the same but picked it up with a shovel and it wouldn’t let go of the shovel.

  8. One of my earliest childhood memories is of my grandfather taking me down to his basement to see a snapping turtle he was about to kill and make into soup. He stuck a wooden broom handle near its head and the turtle snapped the broom handle in two!

    This same grandfather once caught a giant bullfrog to eat and kept it in a 5-gallon metal bucket in his bedroom with a plate of glass over the top. The bullfrog jumped and broke through the glass. My grandmother was not amused with the giant bullfrog loose in her bedroom. I don’t remember if the bullfrog was injured in his escape….

  10. The scientific name, Chelydra serpentina, kind of says it all: these turtles can strike with the speed of a snake and, coupled with their long neck, can get their jaws to cover a lot of ground in a very short time…

  12. The biggest threat to turtles in general, as well as snakes and salamanders, is cars. There is a certain type of alleged human who typically drives a pickup and is forever aged at about 18-28 and always is male. They enjoy crushing amphibians and reptiles with their trucks – especially when accompanied by a similar lower life form. My habit is to stop the car and get these creatures off the road. Snapping turtles are particularly a problem (they scare the hell out of me) so I have a short shovel in the trunk to move them out of traffic’s harm. Baby snapping turtles are about the size of a quarter and are extremely cute. Snappers liked the road by our farm as a place to lay eggs because it was a sandy road. The reptilian brain cannot comprehend cars any more than a raccoon can so the numbers of reptiles and some amphibians is dwindling as the land is cut into smaller and smaller pieces by development.

    1. I too rescue turtles off the road. Last time I tried I met the person you describe and they ran over the turtle as I was waiting for him to pass so I could move it off the road. Asshole.

      2. I’ve met the guy too. a human in gross anatomy.
        No snapping turtles in Britain. But last week when heading off for a walk along the canal bank I spotted “Splat”, a recently terminated badger at the side of the road (I’m trying to remember their relationships now … mustelids? Whatever.) So I made a note of the location, in case anyone wanted it for the skeleton, skin, or bristles (just the thing for shaving brushes, allegedly).
        Next day on a different road, Dad spotted two more splattered badgers. It’s not a good time to be a badger, it seems.
        Yes, mustelids (weasels and the like). For reasons far too involved to bore people with here, the Powers That Be in England have decided to try to kill off the badger population in the face of scientific advice that this won’t actually help with the problem of bovine tuberculosis.
        For anyone in England, in the event of finding roadkill like this, the local naturalists society will probably have a “Recorder” who appreciates such information as it helps to improve the knowledge of populations. Same for meeting setts, sightings of cubs etc.

    2. Good comment, I too have removed snappers from the roads. I live down in the Florida Keys now, and while there’s no snapping turtles here I’m constantly chasing Iguanas away from the highway. Many little critters can’t comprehend cars.

      1. When removing turtles from the road (they are invariably females with eggs) always cross the road in the direction they were heading.

        Otherwise they will turn around and try again.

        3. It’s not alway females with eggs. Sometimes they just go wandering. Makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint since it prevents local inbreeding.

  13. Reminds me of a buddy from grad school who tried something like this with an adder he found resting on a coastal path in Wales. Lowell didn’t lose a finger but came close, spending 3 nights in the local clinic attended by a Pakistani doctor who was pretty cautious about snake bikes.

    Lowell was a vertebrate zoologist who’d logged months in the field in Arizona and central America, so his disrespect was pretty surprising. His comment when he got back home was that he didn’t know there were any poisonous snakes in Britain. He’d evidently forgotten our discussion of the range of the European viper in a biogeography class the previous year!

    2. I should add – for those who don’t know – that Britain has three native snakes. The adder, as mentioned above, is a viper and mildly poisonous (I’ve not heard of anyone dieing from a bite, but it can hurt a lot) ; the grass snake (non-poisonous, but it exudes a very smelly mucus when disturbed), and the smooth snake (which is so rare I’ve never seen one).

  14. I manage to rescue one or two snappers a year from our local roads. Are they grateful? Absolutely not.

  15. Years ago I rescued a clutch of snapper eggs that had been laid in a baseball field. I brought them home (turtle eggs need to be kept oriented unlike bird eggs).

    After a while the eggs hatched, I released most of them in the local reservoir, but kept one for a while.

    For a while he was not much different in behavior from a typical red ear slider, but there came a point where his ‘aggression hormones’ started to kick in. It was fascinating watching him react to everything with an open mouth and aggressive posture. Throw a small fish in his tank and he went to work.

    Eventually he joined his siblings in the reservoir.

    1. They frequently lay eggs on our property. One year my husband accidentally dug up a nest in his garden…before covering it back up and marking it, we kept a couple of eggs, buried them in dirt in a critter carrier, put them on top of the fridge, and mostly forgot about them (I did remember to “water” them now & then). A few months later I was thrilled to look up and see a baby about the size of a quarter. We released him as soon as his yolk was totally absorbed.

      Another time the kids brought in a baby they’d found crawling across the driveway. We thought we’d keep him for “a few days,” but one thing led to another until we realized we’d probably waited too long, and were afraid to release him in the bitter cold. He lived in a tank on our drainboard for quite a while, becoming very tame–my then middle-school-aged daughter would take him out from time to time and give him an algae cleaning bath under the sink faucet. He grew quite a bit over the winter, till he was definitely a “two-hand turtle,” and it was always fun to see the looks on people’s faces when my daughter held him and he was absolutely calm. I have some wonderful pictures of them together.

      Eventually we made ourselves release him, in nice weather in a marsh with a lazy stream, the habitat he’d (or more likely, his Mom) probably come from. We still think of him every time we drive over the bridge there.

      Just last year I spent a few rapt hours watching a large female snapper dig a nest and lay eggs in our lawn. After she left we put a fence around the site so it wouldn’t get mowed or disturbed.

      Yes, I know it’s not a good idea (or legal) to keep wildlife, but when you have budding-naturalist children you sometimes make an exception. The snappers are very far from endangered status here–in fact there’s at least one yearly hunting season on them. I’d never have let the kids keep the Box & occasional Blanding’s Turtles we come across.

      We do love chelonians. In fact, my daughter’s adopted stray, a tortoiseshell pattern cat, is named Cheley–pronounced Keeley.

      Sorry–got carried away there.

      1. “Yes, I know it’s not a good idea (or legal) to keep wildlife, but when you have budding-naturalist children you sometimes make an exception”.

        Indeed. Many distinguished naturalists spent a childhood keeping tadpoles in basins, chasing bugs of one kind another and generally getting down and dirty with wildlife – even collecting birds’ eggs in many cases.
        Of course we are right to have moved on from the nineteenth century approach to zoology which required everything to be killed and preserved in display cases but if we are too insistent on the ‘look but don’t touch’ approach to wildlife that is now promoted we risk failing to ignite the fascination in nature that leads youngsters on to become biologists and conservationists in later life.

        1. Thanks for the support!

          “…we risk failing to ignite the fascination in nature that leads youngsters on to become biologists and conservationists in later life.”

          That says it perfectly.

      3. I would love to hatch baby turtles! I’ve never come across turtle eggs in the wild.

        That story about raising the baby turtle sounds great! And scrubbing off the algae sounds delightful. We used to give our tortoise the occasional soak in warm water and shell scrub.

        1. I found a few pics to show off…:)

          Liz & Allie after algae cleaning shower:

          imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img908/6730/PN1hFN.jpg

          Close up of Allie:

          imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img633/5136/4mioJF.jpg

          Liz & Allie when we were returning him to the wild:

          imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img905/1626/9Z1Ige.jpg

          As always, if WP doesn’t, add “http://” to the front of those urls. WP used to do that automatically but I’ve had trouble with that lately…

          2. Aargh! WP, it was much handier when you just reinserted the missing part of the url.

            WEll, click to enlarge the above.

          5. Great shots, Diane! What a close-up of Allie, though must say thst’s a face only a mother could love🐸

  16. One reason you see so many dead armadillos on the road in some parts of the country is that when an armadillo is startled, it often jumps straight up into the air with all four feet. This “escape tactic”, however, doesn’t work very well when their fright is caused by a vehicle passing directly over them.

    1. I experienced that once on Key Biscayne many years ago. I was driving along a dirt road at night near Cape Florida Lighthouse and pinned an armadillo in my headlights. I stopped my truck, and got out to take a closer look. It didn’t move so I tapped it gently on it’s back with my flashlight to see if it was all right, it shot straight up in the air, I don’t know how high, knocked the flashlight out of my hand and almost hit me in the face, I fell over backwards on the road and it scurried off into the bushes. I never saw another one that far south in Florida.

  17. I have a good picture of a snapper laying eggs but I’m too computer inept to figure out how to post it here.

    2. Mail it to Jerry and he’ll put it in one of the regular “Readers wildlife photos”

      1. Thanks for the tip. Now I have to find the picture in my files, which could take a while due to above mentioned ineptitude, but I will send it along.

        1. Wel, it’s three hours later and I have some success. I found the pictures the old fashioned way by scrolling through my entire iPhoto library. That was actually a fun way to waste time on a snowed-in Sunday morning.
          Now my mail doesn’t work and my trying to fix it has made it worse so I can’t send them even if I knew Jerry’s email address.

          1. Coinkydink–I just spent over an hour going through old pics, too. Yours must be about as organized as mine are…:roll:

            You can find Jerry’s email address by either Googling him or clicking on the “Research Interests” link at the top of the page.

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