Every year at this time hundreds of painted turtles leave the Mississippi River backwaters to lay their eggs. If they all wandered no farther than the beach, there would be no problem. Many of them, however, travel a quarter mile or more and wind up in residential neighborhoods. There I find them hunkered down in street gutters or crossing busy roads. I also see them smashed on the pavement. I don’t know what the correct human response is.
The rule of thumb is to leave nature alone. Well-intentioned efforts to rescue fawns or baby birds usually result in harming animals that don’t need help at all. A turtle walking down the middle of a road with no lake, river, or pond in sight seems the exception. (After writing a draft of this blog, I googled the question. Consensus is to move turtles only if they are likely to be run over by a car, and never move them more than a few hundred yards from where you found them.)
Part of the uncertainty with turtles out-of-water is that it is difficult to tell which way they want to go. Are they heading away from the water to lay eggs, or have they already laid their eggs and are on their return trip? I can imagine a situation where I take a turtle to the river, and her small reptilian brain thinks, “What the hell? I just spent the last eight hours trying to get away from here, and now this jerk brought me back.”
Yesterday I relocated two turtles. Both were in danger of being run over. In one instance, I stopped traffic, picked up a turtle from the middle of the street, and placed her on someone’s lawn. In the thirty seconds it took me to carry out the task, five cars had pulled up behind me. I didn’t look at all of the drivers who were waiting for me to get back in my car, but the first two gave me a thumbs up.
The second turtle was in the parking lot of the long-term care facility where I go to visit my neighbor Charlie. The facility is not far from the river, but it is at least sixty feet higher in elevation than water’s edge. This turtle might have found her way back to the river on her own, but the shortest route was over a precipice. I decided to put her in my car and take her to a boat landing.
I picked the turtle up and carried her to my car. As I reached across the driver’s seat to set her in the footwell on the passenger side, she peed on my arms and all over the upholstery. Then, when I reached the boat landing to release her, she wasn’t where I’d put her. She’d crawled under the passenger seat and wedged herself among the under-seat hardware in a way that I couldn’t get her out. I was reluctant to move the seat, for fear of hurting her, but eventually was able to protect her with one hand while operating the seat’s power controls with the other. Readjusting a car seat with my hand jammed under the seat probably violates the owner’s manual, but I didn’t think I had a choice.
In my experience, turtles retreat into their shells when I approach, but then try to claw themselves free once I pick them up. It is for this reason that I no longer relocate turtles when I’m riding my bicycle. Keeping one hand on the handlebars means one-handing any turtle I am holding. As soon as one starts to wriggle, I have to pin her to my body to keep from dropping her. Usually my forearm and stomach both get scratched.
Yesterday, after successfully extracting my rescuee from beneath the car seat, I set her on the sand close to the water. I intentionally placed her parallel to the shoreline and then waited to see which way she would turn. After about a minute she hadn’t moved at all. I got back in my car and drove home.
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