"Hudson Valley Nature Notes"
by Jim Rod, Manager, Constitution Marsh Sanctuary
Upstream, Summer, 1986, p. 3.
[A description of the habits of snapping turtles]

[What do the Alaskan grizzly bear and the Hudson Valley snapping turtle have in common? Read this to find out! Describes the life and habits of the snapping turtle, which inhabits Constitution Marsh in significant numbers, and furnishes clues to the damage done to its habitat by PCB's and cadmium.]

I'd fished my way about a mile up Dolly Varden stream on Admiralty Island when some of Southeast Alaska's liquid sunshine began to fall. By that time the action had dropped off, and our guide decided it was a good time to clean the fish. Not wanting to disturb him, I changed lures and began working my way back to the better fishing. A misty half-mile walk along the outwash plain brought me within sight of the boat, anchored offshore in 30 fathoms of saltwater, and I'd begun to think about the hot coffee waiting aboard when the grizzly bear showed up. He had eased his half-ton bulk out of the alders without making a sound, and when I noticed him he was a hundred yards away, busily eating sedges between me and the boat and pretending he didn't know I was there. About then my conscience began to bother me so I started back to see if I could help clean the fish. On the way, I found myself thinking about Hudson Valley snapping turtles and it took me a minute to figure out why.

Then it dawned on me that an Alaskan grizzly is really the terrestrial equivalent of a snapping turtle, though admittedly somewhat larger. Both have no predators; are at the top of their food chains; spend the winters hibernating and are genuine omnivores, though both favor a fish diet. when it's easily available. For both animals that's generally later in the summer. When first out of the winter den both turtles and bears are partial to a green salad. As the old joke goes, a grizzly bear can eat whatever he wants, but this one had chosen to forage greedily in the waist-high sedges, and I've seen hundreds of square feet of Constitution Marsh waters covered with the remains of snapping turtle snacks: mostly stems and leaves of arrow arum and pickerelweed. Snappers especially seem to relish the rich tubers of these plants in May and June.

However, despite their ecological similarities and the disparity in their sizes, the snapping turtles have the edge over grizzly bears in one respect: they've been around a lot longer. In fact snapping turtles are the closest thing to a dinosaur we have in the Hudson valley, for they haven't changed much in a hundred million years. They even resemble dinosaurs, with their horny beaks, scaly tails, and heavily clawed feet, but it's the tiny, star-pupilled eyes that really give them the antediluvian glare. Pretty they're not, but what snappers lack in looks, they make up for in a remarkably efficient lifestyle; honed down to the bare essentials of efficient survival.

Almost never in a hurry, snapping turtles spend nearly seven months of each year asleep, buried under several feet of mud where they absorb their greatly reduced oxygen requirement through their skin. They finally wake up in late March and haul themselves out of the mud, but they may not move very far for another two weeks, for it takes the spring sun a while to warm up 40 pounds of cold turtles. Eventually they make it back to the water, but they usually don't start feeding until the water has warmed up considerably, and even then the first food they crave is the green plants mentioned above. Later they will eat some of the slower moving rough fish, and an occasional frog, but green plants remain a staple all summer.

Despite their undeserved reputation, snappers almost never eat muskrat or ducklings. Every year people phone me to report disappearing ducklings on their backyard ponds and naturally want to place the blame on the local snapping turtle. Upon inspection, most of the ponds prove to be marginal duck habitat, usually lacking the dense escape cover baby ducks need to survive. Desperate hens have nested there because of a lack of really good waterfowl habitat in the neighborhood, and prowling raccoons, skunks and house cats pick off the ducklings during the night. If all the ducklings suddenly disappear it usually means the hen has led them off to more secure water, and not that the turtle has been dining on duck.

It was mid-June this year when I met the grizzly bear, which meant that for the first time in several years I had missed the snapping turtle nesting season. These aquatic turtles almost never leave the water except to lay eggs but surprising numbers of them can be on the prowl in June near Hudson River marshes. A few days after I returned from Alaska I walked over the Boscobel to examine a nesting area favored by generations of snappers. In one area about ten feet square I counter 31 turtle nests; most of which had been opened by prowling foxes, coyotes, and raccoons. Turtle eggs are a delicacy Hudson River predators can't resist, and snapping turtle meat is a favorite human food in some areas. A word of caution, though. This summer, possession of striped bass was prohibited because PCB levels generally below ten parts per million. Snapping turtles collected from the Hudson have PCB levels in the fat up to 3,000 parts per million! Don't eat them!

And this, as promised in the last issue, brings me to the world record turtle. The sedentary lifestyle enjoyed by snapping turtles means they can live a long time and food-rich tidal marshes produce some of the biggest. As part of the Superfund study of battery cove wastes in adjacent Foundry Cove, it was necessary to collect a few snappers from Constitution Marsh for cadmium analysis. The consultants were out in my canoe looking for one last turtle when they spied a big one back in a muskrat burrow. By the time they wrestled it into the canoe, it had bitten a neat triangle out of my plastic canoe paddle. To shorten the story considerably, the shell length of this turtle was 19 1/2 inches, which beat the old world record by a full inch. For those requiring proof, I still have the canoe paddle. See you next issue.