Or perhaps we were talking about someone’s escaped pet. Knowing the area well, and by that time having studied wood turtles for several years in some of the most pristine habitat left in the state, I was hesitant to believe that the caller’s identification was correct.
She was calling from North Plainfield, and her backyard abutted the Green Brook floodplain, just about ten miles upstream from the park near my home as a child. Maybe four years later, I received a phone call from a homeowner who said she had found a wood turtle in her yard and she had it in a Tupperware bin. Spring and fall are breeding times for wood turtles, and this guy may have well been searching out a mate. There he was, a male cruising downstream through the center of the water with orange neck stretched out straight ahead of him, seemingly eager to get where he was going. It was spring of 2003, and I was standing atop a bridge with my boss at the time, getting ready to head down to the Wallkill River to begin a survey for New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife’s Endangered and Nongame Species Program, my current employer. I do, however, have a vivid memory of my first wood turtle. Probably, like so many kids growing up in the country’s most densely populated state, the first live turtle I ever saw was likely in a zoo. It probably took me another ten years to learn that water moccasins, or cottonmouths, don’t range this far north along the east coast, and what the locals were really seeing were northern water snakes an animated, but harmless serpent. The older kids would say that water moccasins would attack you if you got too close to the swampy area near the brook.
NINJA TURTLE RADIO CLOCK PATCH
The closest “natural” land to me was a park down the street that backed up to the Green Brook, and off in the other direction was a degenerate patch of woods that sat behind a driving range off Route 22 where friends and I would go hunt for errant golf balls. Where I grew up in suburban Somerset County, the yards were mostly fenced in and fairly well kept. I don’t remember the first time I encountered a wild turtle as a kid.
Slip sliding away Why Did The Turtle Cross The Road? Story and photos by Brian Zarate
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