Snapping Turtle in the Woods

More chins than chinatown. It's a sad thing to let yourself go like this.


This is a decent sized female snapping turtle Chris found in the woods while we were walking with the dogs. This turtle had come up an incredibly steep bank -- almost a cliff -- into the forest in order to lay her eggs. The rest of the year she lives in a flooded forest swamp at the base of the cliff. Male snapping turtles are larger than females -- the opposite of most other turtles.

Around here, snapping turles lay their eggs between May 15 and June 15, and the sex of the hatchlings is determined by the temperature of the nest.

My best guess is that this fellow weighed about 20 pounds -- they are very dense -- and was maybe 20 years old. This is a common snapping turtle of the type found all across the U.S. The infamous alligator snapping turtle is found farther south -- mostly in the southern end of the Misssippi watershed.

A common snapping turtle can easily get over 30 pounds and 60 pounders are rumored.

To give you an idea of how much the camera can lie, the picture above looks bigger than the turtle really is. In the picture below, Chris is holding the same turtle, which actually looks a little smaller than it actually was.




Sadly, we were still pretty clean a few hours later.