AITKIN INDEPENDENT AGE (Minnesota) 02 October 13 Close encounter with turtles (Dave Dickey)
One morning as I was leaving the house recently, I encountered baby snapping turtles. I knew immediately they were probably coming from the south side of our garage as there was evidence of a female trying to lay eggs there early this summer. I thought she was unsuccessful but I was wrong. I called my wife out to see the ones still crawling up out of the ground and she took some good pictures and video.
Since our daughter and grand-kids were going to be over for supper that evening, I decided to collect all of them in a tub so they could see them. Our daughter had encountered baby turtles going down our driveway one day when she came home from school as a youngster and wondered if a mother turtle had been there that day.
After I had collected all the turtles I could find and those still emerging from the nest, I had 35 baby snappers. There must have been quite a hole once they were all out. After supper, my daughter, grandson and I took them down to the river and released them. They seemed happy to be in the water.
Later, I began to wonder how many of the 35 would have made it to some water if we had not carried all of them down to the river? Even since they all made it to the river with our help, how many might still be alive a year from now?
So I went to the Internet and looked up “facts” on snapping turtles. In the general section on turtles I found that in some species, the higher the temperature during incubation, the hatchlings will be females while, the lower the temperature, they will be males. But, this was not mentioned about snapping turtles.
Snapping turtles in captivity have lived up to 47 years while, in the wild, they may live up to 30 years. In the wild, they weigh 10-35 pounds and the heaviest mentioned was 75 pounds.
Snappers mate April through November and the female can hold sperm for a long time until she finds a suitable spot to lay her eggs. Peak egg laying occurs during June and July and she can lay 25-80 eggs each year. Once she lays her eggs, she has nothing more to do with the eggs or the young.
Incubation is temperature dependent and can take 9-18 weeks. I did not note just when the eggs were laid by our garage but they hatched the first week of September. In cooler climates, hatchlings may over winter in the nest.
Another fact that I did not know is you can injure a snapper by picking it up by the tail (not sure how else you might pick it up without getting bitten or scratched. Finally, I’m not sure how motorists manage to hit turtles on the highway as they do not dart into traffic like deer do unless they do it on purpose.
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