Sunday, June 5, 2016

That Maternal Glow

While on my first inspection tour of the workday, I spied a silhouette which is familiar to me... sure enough, it was a sizable snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina):




Snapping turtles tend to stay in the water until the female turtles come to land to lay their eggs. Sure enough, a glance of the turtle's hindquarters revealed that the turtle was depositing her eggs into a hole she had scraped into the ground, note the long 'dinosaurian' tail:




I was able to watch her deposit a couple of white, spherical eggs into the hole, but there was no opportunity to catch this on the camera, and I wasn't about to disturb the turtle in this most crucial of endeavors. I did take a photo of her beatific visage, though:



Isn't she beautiful? As with the killdeer nest I marked the location of the nest with a stake so I can inform the day shift of the location of the nest so nobody steps on it or runs a lawnmower over it. The place is starting to look like a maternity ward.

6 comments:

  1. What a fantastic photo opportunity. That would be awesome to see them laying their eggs.

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  2. It was a wonderful encounter, Tony. I have a soft spot for these monsters, even to the extent of picking up twenty-five/thirty pounders who are perilously close to roadways and relocating them.

    Thanks for stopping by.

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  3. Great pictures. Down here in Houston, we have alligator snapping turtles, which look like regular snapping turtles after a night of hard drinking and sleeping on the street. They get enormous and have very poor tempers.

    We used to catch baby ones in a creek when I was young. Never saw the regular old snapping turtle variety around here, although there were lots of red ears and soft shells.

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  4. I'm jealous, Nasreen. The Bronx Zoo has an alligator snapper, probably about a 200-pounder, in the Reptile House. We have to make do with the 30-pounders. Oddly enough, the common snapping turtle doesn't seem to make its way into Texas... I guess everything is bigger down there.

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