Look who I just met on my walk with Klara! The turtle was crossing the road and, as turtles tend to do, was doing it very slowly. In the middle of the crossing, it decided to stop and go in the opposite direction.
I’m very glad I was there to stop the traffic and get the turtle to safety.
Are turtles indigenous to this area? Does anybody know? Or was it somebody’s pet?
Fascinating! I’d love to meet one on my walks, I did meet an ostrich once! She had wandered off from a circus. I would guess you met a tortoise rather than an actual turtle, but I’m not an expert on American species. Turtles live mostly in water.
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And on looking them up I discover there are Box Turtles in the US, which look like tortoises. So I’ll just stay quiet now!
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The land species that I know (gopher turtles) don’t look anything like this. I’m going to say it looks like an aquatic species that took a wrong turn (unless someone who knows better shows up).
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A well-known Soviet writer once stumbled into his apartment at 4 am, muttering “I’m quitting drink, I swear to God I am! I’ve started seeing pink elephants, I’ve got to quit alcohol.”
On the next day, he opened the newspaper and joyfully exclaimed, “Oh, the joy! I don’t need to quit alcohol!”
The newspaper contained an article on the arrival of circus elephants that had been led across the town at 4 am.
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You have a creek running through your back yard, don’t you? If there are bodies of water then there will be turtles (I can’t say for sure about that particular species since I’m ignorant of exact turtle species).
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I took it in the direction of the creek after picking it up from the road. I hope it stayed there and didn’t venture back across the road.
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If you are more technically adept than I am, and can figure out how to insert your photo into their email set-up, I bet these nice people can answer your question (I think they can help you identify that bird nesting near your house as well).
http://web.extension.illinois.edu/askextension/newQuestion.cfm?AskSiteID=98
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The birds increasingly seem to be buzzards. Which is kind of creeping me out.
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That sort of turtle is very common here in NW Arkansas. I think you’re not that far from here, geographically? (I’m not sure!) We have all sorts of turtles here in the South and Southern/Midwest. Recently my dogs went nuts over a snapping turtle in the yard. I had to rescue both them and it.
And yes, every year around this time we see them crossing the road. Many of my students publish mini-rants on FB about stopping for turtles, b/c other sorts of students make a deal out of not stopping.
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The shell pattern identifies that reptile as an eastern box turtle, indigenous to your area and most of the eastern U.S. I remember seeing them as a child in Tennessee.
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They’re pretty much all over the place, especially near freshwater creeks and such (I’m fairly certain it’s a turtle, not a tortoise, but I’m not exactly an expert on them). It may be somebody’s pet, but it’s not particularly likely. They’re not exactly escape artists, and people don’t tend to just let them wander off on their own outside of a terrarium. More likely it was a wild one that just decided to cross the road, as they sometimes do.
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We have a construction site 500 feet down the road from where the turtle was crossing. I’m very glad I came upon it or the trucks that are streaming from there could have squashed it.
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I’m glad too. I hope it stays safe!
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The construction site may partially explain the movement (though they do have pretty big territories). Loss of habitat (and the roads that come with it) is the major threat to box turtles (and yes, unless there’s another species that looks almost exactly like a box turtle, that’s a box turtle).
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If there is a comment I did not expect, it’s this one. 🙂 I love my blog because it attracts the most interesting people.
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A Catholic Church near the home in which I lived as a kid used to do “turtle soup suppers” every few weeks. Every time there was an event, we would see a few turtles in the streets around the church, apparently escapees from the kitchen. Very hard not to sympathize.
On the more general topic of refugees, honest compassion is the appropriate response. “There but for the grace of [Deity] go I.”
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As a child visiting cousins out in the boonies they once served a dinner of fried meat that was completely delicious – until I found out it was turtle….
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The only things more horrible and immoral would be to eat a hedgehog. Knowingly, I mean.
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But turtle tasted soooooo good. I’d like to say I refused to eat anymore after I learned what it was, but my memory is not clear (after the initial trauma).
Hedgehogs probably don’t taste nearly as good (and I’d never knowingly eat one). But… nutria is freaking delicious, even if they do look like giant rats with orange teeth…
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Christ. What a sad story. Haven’t they heard of mock turtle soup?
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I find turtles cute too but turtle soup is really quite delicious. Highly recommended! (And I find lambs almost impossibly cute but I eat them too. If I centered my eating preferences on avoiding what I find cute, I would probably be confined to eating rats and snakes–shudder.)
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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