Snapping Turtle Egg-Laying Season

Common Snapping Turtle in Pine Lake's Western Wetlands

A long time ago, when I was in grad school at the University of Tennessee, I walked out the door one June morning to find a huge snapping turtle dragging itself up the gravel road beside my house.

I observed it for a while and then went on to school. When I told Gordon Burghardt, my professor, about the turtle, he wanted to know why I hadn't followed it. Clearly, he said, it was on the way to lay eggs. I could have waited, he said, and after the turtle had finally finished its business and returned to the water, dug up the eggs and brought them to him for his reptile lab.

"Right," I said. "And Dallas, by the way, where were you all last week?" I think he saw my point. But I saw his. If it had been he who had seen that turtle, he would have followed it, no matter what his schedule looked like. That's why he's a world-famous herpetologist and I'm not.

It's now egg-laying season for snappers. Someone saw one doing its business last week near the lake, and I chanced across one today in the western wetlands. It was in the grass, no doubt engaged in the egg-laying business.

I could have annoyed that snapper until it turned its head and hissed at me, and I would no doubt have gotten a great picture. But I'm not a Wild Kingdom naturalist.

If you remember the show, in every episode Marlon Perkins' man Jim Fowler was directed to wrestle a crocodile, giant constrictor, hyena, or chimpanzee into submission "for its own good"-- while Marlon watched safely from a distance.

Well, to be fair, Marlon helped sometimes.

Even as a teen I hated the contrivance of that show, and so this morning I kept my distance, getting close only with my zoom lens, annoying Mama snapper only enough to snap a photo or two from a distance of five or six feet.

Click just below to learn more about snapping turtles.



The turtle I saw today was the common snapping turtle Chelydra serpentina, which looks like this...

... and not it's cousin, the larger alligator snapping turtle Macroclemys termmickii, although Atlanta is well within its range. The alligator snapper looks like this:

As you can see, the alligator snapper has a rougher carapace than the common snapping turtle. It also has a hooked beak:

Here they are side by side. The alligator snapper is on the right:

Photo from Chelydra.org

Alligator snappers can grow to be huuuge:

Beside the differences in size and appearance, the alligator snapper poses a lure in the form of a brightly-colored tongue. When hunting, it opens its mouth wide and wriggles its tongue, attracting fish which soon become turtle food.

Photo Scanned From My Copy of The Audubon Society Field Guide
To North American Reptiles and Amphibians

Like most other turtles, snappers are long-lived, lasting about 30 years in the wild and up to 50 years in captivity. They are edible, and both the carapace and plastron (the two halves of the shell) are prized. Because of human predation, both species (and the related Florida alligator snapper) are considered sensitive species and protected in a number of states.

Those massive jaws can inflict a nasty bite and even clip off human fingers. The rumor, at least in the South is that if a snapper clamps down on you it won't let go until it thunders. That's not true, but no doubt a snapper won't let go until it no longer feels threatened. Considering their flexible necks, it makes good sense not to get too close.

I think snappers are marvelous. With their heavy armor plating they look rather like dinosaurs, and who doesn't like dinosaurs?