Why does the turtle cross the road?
Traffic was stopped in both lanes. Five vehicles, maybe more, sat in the road and more were coming.
The snapping turtle watched from her place on the centerline of Horsley Mill Road. Lunging and snapping at the cars, she was spinning like a top. Were the people in them stopping to help her or were they thinking about turtle soup? A turtle brain can’t make such a judgment.
She had left the water to lay her eggs — ten to one hundred leathery shelled, ping pong ball size eggs buried in a sandy hole and abandoned to their fate. After 55 to 125 days, depending on temperature and conditions, the eggs will hatch. The sex of the hatchlings will be determined by incubation temperature — warmer temperatures produce females.
Most of the little turtles won’t survive. In fact, most of the eggs won’t survive because they are unprotected from predation. If her eggs do hatch, the baby turtles must run the gauntlet of predators, cars, and dehydration as they leave the nest and seek water.
The ecosystem and the overall health of the turtle population aren’t well served if too many survive. But the individuals that do survive are best fitted to their environment.
Individual snappers can be very long-lived — once they are big enough and are in a suitable environment, their only predator is human. Snapping turtles can get really big, with a shell sixteen or more inches in diameter. A turtle of such size is very thick and contains considerable meat. Turtle soup was a staple food for the Europeans who settled North America. But despite heavy hunting pressure at different times, the snapping turtle population has always been stable — probably due to their reclusive behavior and heavy armor, as well as their innate longevity. There have been reports of captured snapping turtles with Civil War era bullets embedded in their shells.
It isn’t just individual turtles that are longlived. The species has remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, and turtles as a group have remained mostly unchanged since before the dinosaurs. Their continuous presence throughout human history coupled with their size, their slow-moving nature, and their prehistoric appearance is probably the reason that many cultures revere turtles as symbols of wisdom and make them central characters in their creation stories. Many Native American creation stories speak of the turtle as the foundation upon which the first land formed. Some individuals still refer to North America as Turtle Island.
The turtle in Horsley Mill Road knew none of this. Turtle brains only think about survival, and to survive she had to get back to the water to hunt and to eat, and the things on the road were blocking her way.
The snapping turtles’ reputation as a ferocious and aggressive beast is partially true. When out of the water they aggressively defend themselves and have the armor and weapons to do so. Their feet sport long sharp claws with webbing between the toes, their shell has symmetrical ridges and points, and their thick muscular tail looks like it belongs to an alligator. They look tough and they act tough. But all of this is mostly for show. When you meet one in the water, it will try to slip away from you and hide. A snapping turtle prefers to avoid conflict.
The turtle in Horsley Mill Road was a striking example of her species. A shell more than a foot in diameter. Snapping at anything that moved. She was trapped by the cars and didn’t have the option of slipping away to hide. I pulled off the road and walked up to her. Another man joined me and a third said, “She was going that way,” and pointed. I grabbed her tail and pitched her out of the road — not the recommended way to move a mad snapping turtle, but it worked. She scrambled away as fast as a water turtle can move on land and disappeared in the grass.
Was she searching for a place to lay her eggs or trying to find her way home? I’ll never know, but she lived. Maybe next year she can find a suitable place for a nest without having to cross the road. STANLEY TATE Jim Powell of Young Harris