Moving a turtle to Safety

[JG55]

Coming home last night. As I approach my street I see a Box Turtle in the middle of the road. Not sure where he thinks he is going but I stop and decide I was going to pick him up and move him to safety. He had other ideas. Usually when I have approached a box turtle they go in their shell, not this one. He turned around and started scampering back from where he came. I baby stepped behind him and he kept moving until he got in yard where he stopped lifted his head all the way up, looked around and kept moving.

Not sure which is funnier the box turtle acting like a pet or me baby stepping behind him while he does the turtle's version of scampering. LOL

[UncleJak]

I have done this several times. I even assist snapping turtles, but from a further distance. Something about this time of year brings the turtles out.

[MikePapa1]

I do this, too. I love turtles. By the way, be careful TWRA folks don't see you, it's a crime to "interfere" with them.

Edited June 12, 2012 by MikePapa1

[Steelharp]

You know, guitar picks used to be made out of the shells... now it's really hard to find any.

(That's a lot of good "pickin' on the hoof" you let get away there, hoss... )

[enfield]

I've helped many turtles cross the road and will continue to do so, government be damned!

[Guest Lester Weevils]

A good sized snapper has surprisingly long legs and can pick em up and put em down pretty quick. Or maybe there are sub-breeds with different length legs. I tried to chase about a 2 footer off the road and he raised up and chased me 20 feet back to my car. I didn't have a measuring stick with me and might have estimated wrong, but he lifted up at least 6 inches off the asphalt when he was trotting after me. I think several inches higher than 6 off the ground, but like I said wasn't trying to measure the distance, was more interested in getting back in the car.

[mcurrier]

I tried to help a snapping turtle once. He took a swipe at me and tried to chomp me and he was on his own after that.

[monkeylizard]

This.

[East_TN_Patriot]

I tried to help a snapping turtle once. He took a swipe at me and tried to chomp me and he was on his own after that.

+1

When I was a cop in Florida, I was working day shift and rolled up on a big traffic jam on one of our main 4 lane highways through the city. I worked my way up to the front and found that a big ol' snapping turtle, probably a couple feet long, was camped in the middle of the inside lane with no intention of moving along. I did my best to assist that darn thing and it hissed and snapped at me a few times. I ended up letting him take a bite out of my ASP baton and then drug him to the side of the road. He finally let my baton go. I left after traffic started flowing and couldn't have cared less if that thing ended up as roadkill from that point on.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Interesting, wonder how likely they are to chase people who disturb em? Maybe what I saw was a (relatively rare) territorial thang or it was mating or nesting season or whatever?

I had found a six foot stick on the side of the road and intended to poke him on the shell a couple of times to get his attention and shoo him off the road. Poked him one time and he showed bad attitude and no intention to move. Poked him a second time and he chased me back to the car and then he camped out by the drivers door staring at me thru the window daring me to come back out. I decided it was his own business if he wanted to be road kill.

In hindsight if I'd been smart could have got him off the road anyway. If I'd run back to the car and got in the passenger door, then the snapper would have chased me to the passenger door and been off the road daring me to get back out of the car. But even then, maybe he would have gone back in the road to nap after I left.

Edited June 12, 2012 by Lester Weevils

[Dennis1209]

I stop myself when it's safe to do so. I'll usually move them off the road 5-10 yards in the direction they are headed. I'm no expert but, I think this time of year the box turtles are traveling in search of a mate and that's why you see so many on the roads.

I have not even considered checking Tennessee wildlife laws governing box turtles. If I'm a law breaker relocating a turtle from becoming road kill, and doing so in a safe manner, then the law is in conflict with common sense.

BTW. I had a medium size box turtle in my driveway last month. Went inside to get a cold drink, etc. and wanted to show the wife the neat little critter. Went back outside where it was, only 10 minutes elapsed at most. Checked in a 35 yard radius and we could not find it. They must move pretty good when they want to?

[NRA]

Karma will pay you back, no good deed ..........

[zapfbroad]

Yeah they can cover some ground surprisingly quick...some country (se asia?) has turtle races for big money

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk 2

[Ebow1]

Reminds me of an old Indian story. Pony and coyote were having argument, when turtle came walking by. Pony said to turtle, "Turtle, could you yell at coyote for me." Turtle asked "Why can't you yell at coyote?" And pony said "Because, I am a little horse".

[JG55]

lol

[10-Ring]

I saw three box turtles crossing the road within about a 3 mile stretch yesterday. I stopped and moved one, the other two were not in locations where it was safe to stop. And I wasn't interfering, I was helping him along the way. Interfering would be if I took him to where he just came from.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

For your continued boredom ramblings of dubious veracity tangentially related to box turtles--

About 2008 when we fenced an acre of hilly suburban woods for the dawgs to run, was amazing how many box turtles we accidentally fenced in. Because one of the hounds is a master digger/escape artist, I had to rim the bottom of the entire fence line with four foot wide, square-mesh fence wire, making the fence without doubt 100 percent box-turtle-proof with rectangular wire mesh laid two feet on the ground and overlapped a couple of feet against the bottom of the chain link.

Wouldn't have expected that a random acre of TN hillside would support so many box turtles. Alternately where the heck did they live in that acre of woods that I didn't notice em beforehand? The burb woods extends a few acres uphill above my property and maybe 40 acres total up the ridge overlapping many folks un-used back yards. Apparently the typical box turtle likes to wander farther than one acre. For about a year, every couple of weeks I'd find another previously-unnoticed box turtle trying to escape the fence to "greener pastures".

They ain't the smartest critters. I'd find em at the top fence line with their head stuck thru the chainlink, moving all four feet like they thought they were going somewhere. I'd walk the fence line near daily but maybe the po box turtle had been trying to walk thru the fence for hours before I noticed him. The main gate was down in the valley so every time I'd pick up the newest escapee, tote him downhill and let him loose on the other side of the fence. Then a few hours later he'd be gone into the underbrush.

Haven't noticed box turtles trying to get back in the fence, but maybe they can sometimes sneak under the wire mesh from outside, or maybe they are smarter than I give credit and they know better than try to get back in the fenced area.

But wait, there's more-- About 1998 was walking the lab in the neighborhood and noticed a 6 week old black pup abandoned in a culvert. Looked kinda like a lab pup. I took her home then a week later she got parvo and had to be nursed back to health. Daughter had named the Lab Bailey so I named the culvert pup Barnum. After she grew up she didn't look like a lab any more. Either no tail or docked tail and lots of curly fur. The air conditioner man said she looked kinda like his australian shepherd, so I made provisional guess some kind of mongrel australian shepherd mix.

She was a sweet dog as most dogs are. Barnum liked to keep pets. She would hunt up little baby snakes and tote em inside and keep em on her dog bed. Every time they would try to crawl off she would fetch them back to her bed. She was also real fond of pet turtles. She would adopt box turtles and keep em on her bed in the piano room and was none too pleased when I'd take the turtles away and set em free.

Anyway I assumed she was some kind of Aussie-Lab mix til ten years later she got cancer. Found a nice guy, house-call farm vet to come over and put her to sleep at home, and he told me that she was a boykin spaniel. I mean, the name doesn't mean anything but it was interesting to know. Never heard of that breed.

So later on was watching a PBS show about Turtle dogs. A NC fella John Rucker had several Boykins and he was interested in box turtle conservation. He discovered that his dawgs were real easy to train to retrieve appalachian turtles in the woods. He said that a well trained college biology student might find one turtle per hour but his boykins could collect lots more and they worked cheap and enjoyed the job. So he started taking his pack of boykins to biological surveys and pre-collection before bush hogging park lands. Collect all the turtles, mark where they came from, then bush hog the fields and put the turtles back where they came from.

So anyway Mr Rucker has videos that are fun but strange to watch because it is a bunch of barnums running the woods and fields acting just like barnum used to. Mr. Rucker thinks he somehow trained his boykins to collect turtles, which I have no gripe about, but OTOH Barnum naturally had the identical turtle-collecting behavior. Barnum was never trained to do much of anything and didn't even know that she was a boykin,

She got to enjoy the fenced woods about 6 months in her old age and spent most of the day elderly wandering the little woods collecting turtles. Never killed em. Just collecting pets. The world is a strange place.

Barnum--

http://www.turtledogs.org/about_us

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