Posts Tagged 'turtles'

VLS

Published August 30, 2020 Fieldnotes 4 Comments
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Very Large Snapper: Green-Wood has a few of them.
In general, they stay in the murk of three of the four ponds. The forth has lately been drained to just a few inches of water.
This one must be a female, ashore to lay eggs. Where the devil is she doing that?
Once I passed out of sight, she got back to moving, towards the water. They are very lumbering when on the move.
Here’s another of the big ones, up-periscope in late June.
Leech-heaven.

PSA:
New York City residents can now request absentee ballots for the November election.

In NY, the “temporary illness” category now includes the pandemic thread: “If you are affected by COVID-19 and/or the potential of contracting the virus, please check the box for “Temporary Illness” on the application. The definition has been temporarily expanded to include “a risk of contracting or spreading a disease” such as COVID-19.”

More on voting in NY this November.

Folks in other states, now is the time to figure out your options.

Bent Snapper

Published July 18, 2020 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
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Medium-sized snapping turtle.
By medium-sized, I mean the shell here is bigger than your average dinner plate.

About a month ago, I ran into this same turtle in the water.
This carapace (top shell) is unique, and rather unusual. I’ve never seen the spines on the far edge pointing upwards on other specimens.

Diamondbacks

Published June 16, 2019 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
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It’s hard to see through the intervening plants, but this terrapin is just starting to dig a hole for her eggs. We were on the path. This is an excellent example of why people need to stay on the path out at Jamaica Bay, as well as Salt Marsh Nature Center where Killdeer and Oystercatchers nest in the grasses. These are places where humans don’t need to be the priority.It took just under half an hour for the whole excavation, laying, burial. Her back feet are surprisingly long. She extends them way back to paddle back the sandy soil she first dug up. All done, she headed back to the bay. She never sees her own eggs.

Unfortunately, the road and bridge connecting these formerly isolated pieces of land in the bay mean the Wildlife Refuge is crawling with raccoons. The raccoons eat the vast majority of Diamondback Terrapin eggs laid here.

More about these Diamondback Terrapins.

How About Some Turtles

Published April 18, 2019 Fieldnotes 2 Comments
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Recently seen:
Some Spotted Turtles. The last pictured was tiny, perhaps 1.5″ down the shell (head to tail).Painted Turtles.At a whole other scale, a veteran Snapping Turtle krakening the shallows.

***
The new abolitionism: a fascinating profile of Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

The Leeches Are Winning

Published August 30, 2018 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
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Snapping Turtles (Chelydra serpentina) in combat.Ugh, the leeches! On face and feet and even shell. This stagnant puddle of “fresh” water is simply crawling, or fluttering, with leeches.

Here’s some footage of this colossal wrestling match that was too large to email back to myself from my phone…

Here’s Solnit on the absolute necessity of impeachment.

Be the Turtle You Want To Be

Published June 18, 2018 Fieldnotes 2 Comments
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Snapping Turtle Chelydra serpentina. The females are making their way ashore now to lay eggs. Some will walk a long way, unfortunately attempting to cross roads, so keep an eye out if you’re driving.The clouds were turning on and off the sun.

I’d say this was a medium-large sized specimen. I’ve seen larger ones, true, but I’m not going to call this one small.

Nesting

Published June 15, 2018 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
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Two Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum) were cutting across the parking lot repeatedly. They were gathering nest material: Seems awfully late, doesn’t it? Many species have already fledged this year. Others are well into incubation. But Cedar Waxwings are very late nesters: they want their young to be hungry around the same time as summer’s fruits and berries ripen. A Diamondback Terrapin nesting at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. She comes ashore, clambers towards some sandy soil, and starts digging a hole with her back feet before laying her eggs and covering them up. We saw more than a dozen in the waters, crawling around, or in the hands of Hofstra’s Jamaica Bay Terrapin Research crew. These terrapins, the only local turtle species that lives in briny water, have, like many turtle species, temperature sex determination. That’s right, the sex of the wee baby turtles is determined by temperature. Read more about JBTR research.

I also had a fantastic Independence Day with the terrapins (hey, it’s not their fault some idiots built JFK on their breeding grounds) some years ago.

The Snappers Are Restless

Published April 19, 2018 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
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One of the gigantic Chelydra serpentina of Brooklyn.Another? There were at least two big ones in this pond. But note the difference in leech positions.

By the way, just look at all the parasitic life-forms latched onto this one’s head and neck! Crowd-sourcing these pictures to Twitter, I found some suggestions that these were Placobdella parasitica and P. ornata, a.k.a. the turtle leech.

Yellowbelly

Published March 22, 2018 Fieldnotes 3 Comments
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On a 40F day, a single turtle is observed on the edge of the Sylvan Water. What’s this, though? Not a Red-eared Slider (Trachemys scripta elegans), by far the most common turtle across the city. I once counted 70 basking along the Lullwater in Prospect Park.

This is a Yellow-bellied Slider (Trachemys scripta scripta). As their binomials, which are actually trinomials, suggest, they’re the same species. Both sliders are native to the southeast. The pet trade has spread them all over.

Please don’t get a turtle for a pet. It’s a wild animal. It shouldn’t be captive. I don’t think it matters that they’re bred for the trade: nobody should be making a profit off of them. Also, those shitballs on the sidewalk who sell them when they’re under 4″ are illegal animal traders, so report them.

So many of these impulse buys are then disposed of, if the turtles are lucky, in local fresh water far from their native region by irresponsible fools. It’s a great way to spread disease and screws the turtles who are supposed to be here. What the fuck is wrong with people who do this kind of thing?

Make Your Own Metaphors

Published March 11, 2018 Fieldnotes 4 Comments
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Turtle with a leech latched onto its…brain? Some people say the Senator from Oligarchy, Mitch McConnell, whose career is based on an infusion of foreign cash, looks like a turtle. I wouldn’t want to insult a turtle with that comparison. But the miserable old cynic sure acts like a leech on democracy… so there’s that.

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This work by Matthew Wills is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.