Turtle Diary

Two days, two eastern box turtles. This mostly terrestrial chelonian, considered a "species of special concern," is widespread in our area but probably not all that common numerically. I see maybe one a year, often in more or less the same spots. The empty shell above may be the remains of one I saw on two occasions a few years ago. It appears to have succumbed to a predator strong enough to pierce its armor. No such grim fate as yet for the red-eyed male below, which I observed when he was, improbably, in the process of climbing over a stone wall. I kept my distance and he held his ground.

Digging

During a recent morning jaunt around a lake in Acadia National Park we came across this snapping turtle hollowing out a nest on the edge of the trail. Staring straight ahead while using its back legs to excavate an impressively deep pit, it seemed little concerned by our presence — what, after all, does an adult snapper in a national park have to fear, except car tires? — nor by the gravel and maple seeds on its back, and went about its business with proverbial Chelonian slowness and sang-froid (they are cold-blooded, after all).

We watched the spectacle for fifteen minutes or so, then moved on. When we returned to the same spot a few hours later there was no sign of the turtle but the hole had been carefully covered over. Once we knew what to look for we found a number of other nests in the vicinity, some of which had been broken into by predators, leaving exposed scraps of eggshell and one more or less intact egg.

Other prisoners

Miscellaneous photos, all taken this spring within a mile of downtown, of some of our distant cousins in the Being business.

From top: unidentified snake, green frog, box turtle, melanistic gray squirrel, rose-breasted grosbeak, feral cat. Below: raven, barred owl.

Update: In posting and titling the above, I had temporarily forgotten this passage from Henry Beston (even though I had used it last year):

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.