Episodes of heavy public visitation in key turtle habitats had served
to keep me from a return for some time; but on the 25th of August,
following the first sustained rain in months, I decided to look in on
wood and spotted turtle areas. I searched the nesting terrain of the
wood turtles and found no new evidence of either predation or
successful hatching. This leaves my known tally at nine nests; only
one of which launched hatchlings. The other eight were taken by
predators on the cusp of nest emergence by hatchlings, as reported in
earlier postings. This late-season nest predation, all but certainly
by skunks, was unprecedented in my 22 or so year history of surveying
this terrain. Hopefully an episode that will not become commonplace,
this year’s status is in sharp contrast to last year’s, when I found
eight nests that had successfully hatched out and no evidence of any
nest taken by predators. Such variables are among the factors that
must be taken into account in any effort to preserve habitat complexes
(and their complex coevolutionary workings) that would allow wood
turtle colonies, and their associated ecology, to be sustained over
time.

I went on to find two wood turtles, a female and a male, both adults.
Both turtles, who go back at least twenty years in my notes, had all
limbs intact (not a common feature of turtles of this place since the
winter of great otter predation), and both were older members of their
colony; they featured that “sea glass” smoothness of the carapace that
seems to come with age. This is not uncommon in males as they age, but
I have seldom noted it in females. The two were less than ten yards
apart in an area I refer to as the “sweetfern corner’, which has been
much-favored by wood turtles over my tenure in this area, the quite
small niche that has consistently been the source of many findings,
often – as on this occasion – when I have not seen any in the rest of
the habitat I have searched. They were in a classic blend of wood-
turtle-favored terrestrial vegetation: deer-tongue grass; sweetfern;
blackberry brambles; bracken fern; and goldenrod. The male, remarkable
in being intact to the tip of his tail, was within several feet of
where I came upon him on the first of August. I found them at 12:38
and 12:51 respectively; temperatures in the mid-seventies, generous,
steady drifts of cumulus clouds, and vegetation still wet in shadows
at midday favored wood turtle finds. As I regarded them I thought that
a wood turtle colony could begin right here, with them. Their habitat
must allow.

On my way to the far end of the Great Alder Carr I stopped to search
the sandy earth where I had seen what appeared most certainly to be a
completed snapping turtle nest on the 23rd of May. As noted at that
time, this was quite early in the season for nesting by this species.
But droughty spring and summer notwithstanding this has been a season
of many plants’ flowering two weeks to a month ahead of their usual
timings (a pumpkin harvest reported in mid-July, e.g.) Rose pogonia
orchids, which I customarily find beginning to bloom on the last days
of June to early July, were in flower on the first of June this year.
But there are variables in turtle nesting in any season, it seems: I
received a report of a snapping turtle nesting on a roadside the
second week of July. *** I found an exit hole just where I had
suspected a nest to be, but decided not dig in, as I thought of
bringing Laurette to see the exit hole as it had been left by the
emerging hatchlings.

During the sustained rains that had finally come I kept envisioning
spotted turtles making migrations, leaving sites of terrestrial
aestivation to return to wetland habitat, in particular those in which
they overwinter. Observations, though not many in number (I remain far
more qualitative than quantitative in my Swampwalker naturalist
tradition), have suggested this to be an aspect of this species’ cycle
of the seasons. The rain was not nearly enough to restore seasonal
wetlands such as vernal pools; but could well have stimulated turtle
movements, and would perhaps allow a sighting of a spotted turtle in
late summer, when such finds are most
difficult to come by. Accordingly, I waded into the Far End, where a
system of beaver impoundments deflecting water from a permanent stream
maintain a rather constant water level even in the driest times. It is
the primary zone of hibernation for spotted turtles that I am aware
of, and where I go as soon as any openings occur in the ice in late
March to early April. And while sightings can be readily made at that
seasonal timing, they are rare outside of it, even when the turtles
have returned to this shrub swamp prior to entering hibernation. Not
unexpectedly, I did not see a spotted turtle. From my notebook: 26
August, 1448h – waiting/watching for turtle, knee-deep in the
permanently flooded western edge of the alder carr; hidden (screened)
in the embrace of royal fern and tussock sedge, I am in the company of
water not perceptibly moving; still air occasionally stirring; the sky
and slow-drifting clouds and their reflections here and there on the
black water; the sun… the late August day with its passage of time
and the expectancy of turtle (though I may have to wait until the end
of March, the beginning of April).

On the 27th I did return to show Laurette the exit hole of the
snapping turtle nest and to dig into it. The ceiling and the walls of
the nest chamber were quite hard-packed, likely a result of the dry
season. I felt as though I were reaching into a fired ceramic vessel.
It must have taken laborious digging for the hatchlings to unearth
themselves; and it is probable that the recent rain had aided them in
the effort, with some softening. I found first a number of eggs that
had failed to develop; these were on the top of pipped eggshells and I
wondered if the upper layer of the clutch had succumbed to the
drought, although turtle eggs appear to be remarkably resistant to
desication. Among the opened eggshells I found a hatchling. He was
entirely caked in the sandy matrix of his nest. A moist eye opened; in
all that mineral environment of eggshell and hard-packed sand, a moist
eye gleaming in sunlight, the first looking out at the light of day by
a bit of life that could seem to have been born of grains of sand and
occasional touches of rain. The hatchling featured a curled tail;
something I have noted before in snapping turtles, on one occasion a
tail that was a veritable corkscrew in configuration.

I do not see how this one could have ever managed to climb out the
nest. Unmoving but for the opening of the eye, the hatchling gave the
impression of being under stress, perhaps developmentally delayed. But
when I put
him in a shallow container of water from the nearby marsh, he sprung
to life at once, energetically stroking in snapping turtle fashion,
full of life and programmed to be on his nest-to-water journey, and
whatever eventual snapping turtle existence and fate.

In 1856, on the date of this writing, Thoreau wrote in his JOURNAL:

Consider the turtle. A whole summer – June, July, and August – is not
too good nor too much to hatch a turtle in. Perhaps you have worried,
despaired of the world, meditated the end of life and all things
seeming to rush to destruction; but nature has steadily and serenely
advanced with the turtle’s pace. The young turtle spends its infancy
within its shell. It gets experience and learns the ways of the world
through that wall. While it rests warily on the edge of its hole, rash
schemes are undertaken by men and fail. Has not the tortoise learned
the true value of time? You go to India and back and the turtles in
your field are still unhatched. French empires rise or fall, but the
turtle has developed only so fast. So is the turtle fitted to endure.
One turtle knows several Napoleans. What’s a summer? Time for a
turtle’s eggs to hatch.