Cheezburger the Porch Cat was lounging around all slit-eyed when he suddenly went into attack mode. Following his twitchy-whiskered stare I saw a lumbering medieval gray thing ambling up my neighbor's front walk. It looked for all the world like a Komodo Dragon - long legs, swaying from side to side, thick tail dragging on the ground.
Dang, I thought to myself, I need to lay off the caffeine and quit watching Discovery Channel. I'm hallucinating. But Cheezburger could see it too.
On closer observation it was a ginormous snapping turtle! Snapping turtle identification: Pointy nipple thingies on the top rear of the shell and a serrated shell edge near the tail. (Click on photos to embiggen)
He was headed up to the third step in this first photo. He stepped up onto the first and second like it was no big deal. He had some big ol' long legs. He kinda hunkered down when I accosted him with the camera.
Get a load of that tail! I've never seen such a thing on a turtle. The little box turtles around here are about a quarter of this guy's size. You can barely see their tails.
See all the cut grass on his head? My next-door neighbor had the thickety back of her property cleaned out this morning. It probably roused this poor guy out of his habitat. I kinda felt sorry for him. He has that deer-in-the-headlights look in his sweet little eyes.
His claws are larger than Cheezburger's.
The Spousal Urban Wildlife Relocation Unit arrived with a shovel to move Mr. Turtle to safer surroundings at a nearby creek. The poor turtle is looking pretty miserable at this point.
Turtle sez: "Now what? This day is just going from bad to worse."
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Snapping Turtle!
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5 comments:
THAT is one cool-lookin' turtle! It makes me feel like I'm eight years old again.
What an amazing creature! Cool beans!
Oh how adorable..did you feed him the lettuce your husband picked up at the store?
Sage - Woooo.... I didn't want my fingers anywhere near him! He could have taken off my finger in the blink of an eye!
We JUST found one of these in our yard (this past Spring, a huge mamma Snapper came up from our pond & laid eggs/burried them in the sandy dirt near our house's foundation. Never did see any babies but today my hubby snapped a pic of one the size of a dinner plate w/the same long tail/long as a pencil. Few years back I saw the TALL grass moving as-if something BIG was making it move, so I walked over to check it out and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a HUGE Snapping Turtle the size of a BIG ottoman, big enough for a grown man to sit on! And this turtle couldn't have cared LESS about me! It just turned itself around 180 degrees to get a gander at me since I approached it from behind (it was soo big that it only took it about 3 maneuvers to turn 180 degrees!). Another year a medium size snapper laid eggs next to a tree in our yard, but the next morning all the eggs were dug-up & cracked open: I assume something dug them up/ate them. A Wildlife biologist in our area wasn't too sad to hear about that! Here ends all my turtle tales :)
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