By NANCY JANE KERN
YEARS AGO, I FOUND a magnificent common snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, on a dirt road. It lay there in the sun sort of sprawled out, possibly laden with eggs. It did not want to move, and the curious turtle was very cooperative and posed in several positions for my camera. Eventually, a car came along, and the turtle decided this was not a good place to be. It rose on its claw-covered toes and with surprising speed moved off the road and disappeared into the grassy ditch.
This brought back memories of my first encounter with a “snapper” during an afternoon of bullhead fishing with my maternal grandfather, “Gramp.” He often took me fishing and spent many hours teaching me the proper ways of doing it. That day was going well, and we had lots of fish for supper. Suddenly, the worm baited hook and the fishing line bobber slowly sank and the line was pulled deep and away. The hook was set with a flip of the rod, and the fight was on. This was a strong and huge fish. Normally we were lucky if we got a fish larger than a pound in weight. It was pulled up on shore and to our surprise there was a big turtle, not a fish.
My experience had been with smaller harmless painted turtles so this one caused no alarm. Walking up to it was a big mistake as a foot-long neck shot out of the shell, and a piece of rubber was bitten out of my little black boot. I jumped backward. Gramp picked up the turtle by the fishing line and put it in the back of the pickup truck and we took it home. My uncle had also been fishing and had caught a batch of yellow perch. He knew what the turtle was and somehow worked the hook out of the turtle’s mouth with a long piece of wood. He cleaned his perch and wanted to show me the features and behavior of the turtle, so he took a perch skin and held it out some distance from the turtle’s head. The neck shot out again and the turtle snapped the skin right out of his hand, narrowly missing his fingers. A snapper can easily amputate a human finger with its beak and powerful jaws. The well-fed turtle was later released near a farm pond.
Canada geese are always watching for them. In addition to eating vegetation, fish, worms, frogs and small mammals, the snapping turtle will pull birds underwater and eat them too. A pair of geese will herd their goslings between them through the water and put their heads down to ensure safe passage. Unless you have special training, these turtles should be left alone and observed from a distance. A feisty small hatchling managed to nip my finger, and adults can even reach back over their shell and snap you if held by the tail.
They are fast and powerful. They can live 40 to 50 years or more and weigh 50 pounds. Snapping turtles are used by many people in turtle stews and soups. Snapping turtle shells were used in many ceremonies among Native Americans. The shells were dried and mounted on handles with corn kernels inside for use as rattles. Iroquois mythology maintains that the earth rests on the back of a turtle.
The NYState Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has studied them for contaminants like PCB’s because of their diet and long life to accumulate them. You can get quite close to female snappers while they are digging nest holes to lay their leathery-shelled eggs. It is possible to sit quietly nearby and watch the whole process. Days later the eggs may have been dug up by raccoons or other animals and eaten. These intriguing, dinosaur-like reptiles once inspired a birthday gift to a great-nephew of a Peterson “Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians” by Roger Conant. It was received with enthusiasm, and at age nine it was time for him to learn how to avoid getting a hole in his boot, or worse, while fishing.
Times change and now he has a smartphone with apps to identify many things including our turtles. The common snapping turtle became our New York State reptile in 2006.
