Memorial Day Visitor

The first thing I heard was “Come here quick! And bring the camera!” followed by more muted but equally forceful statements to the kids to stay put. My first thought was a snake, but that didn’t make sense. If the Wife saw a snake, she wouldn’t want a camera, she’d want a tree to climb. I grabbed the camera and headed out.

“There’s a big box turtle in our garden,” she said. She was also fairly emphatic that she wanted it gone because she couldn’t finish her weeding with the turtle in the garden. First, I’m pretty sure she was referring to a painted turtle and second, how big could it be?

I was prepared for something in the 6-8 inch range for a shell and figured getting it out of there wouldn’t be an issue.

Let’s just say there was plenty of wrong to go around.

That, is a common snapping turtle and I was not about to get within striking distance. I’m not sure how well scale comes across in the picture, but the shell was probably 13 or so inches long. The tail was another 8. It was easily the largest snapping turtle I’d seen outside of a zoo.

And it was sitting in the mint in the Wife’s garden.

After doing a little research on it, I decided it could setup camp in the Wife’s garden as far as I was concerned. Apparently, the common variety of snapper is the most aggressive and can easily reach it’s rear legs with it’s bite. I never did test it’s bite range, but I can say that it never acted aggressively at any point. No hissing or snapping.

The kids were thrilled for awhile. I even tickled the boy’s imagination when I reminded him of the baby snapping turtle we’d brought home last year. We found it on the road side and decided to preemptively move it so it wouldn’t get whacked by a car. I suggested that possibly this was that little turtle. That put a smirk on his face while he considered the possibility. Once it became clear that it wasn’t something that was interested in playing, they moved on to the toads in the yard.

So the turtle hung out in the garden all day. I watered the garden at one point, because yesterday was so ridiculously hot and humid, and the turtle got a little bit of a break from the heat. He even stayed for dinner, where we decided to name it “Crush.”

Until it left, we figured it must be laying eggs. Why else would it travel up from the stream into the yard? I’ll also say I’m surprised the stream could support one that size. But when it finally did depart, there was no hole or eggs. So it just must have been a wayward traveller, caught in the garden and deciding to wait out the heat of the day and hope it wouldn’t become soup.

Sometime around dusk was when we first noted Crush had left the garden. A quick bit of searching revealed it was down behind our garden, clearly heading for the stream. The dogs harassed it a bit, but I called them off. I actually got to see it plunge into the stream and swim off.

I suppose, for a turtle, any day you can swim away from is a good one.