WGBH (Boston, Massachusetts) A Cape Cod Notebook: Snapping Turtle (Robert F....

WGBH (Boston, Massachusetts) 09 May 06 A Cape Cod Notebook: Snapping Turtle (Robert Finch)
On the way home from town last week, I saw a large, dark object in the middle of the road. I stopped the car and got out to look at it. It was a snapping turtle, the first of the season, and a whopper. Nearly two feet long, it had a dark-brown, crusty shell, a large scaly head with a hooked, hawk-like beak, claws for feet, and a long, dragging, serrated tail. Its appearance was impressively ferocious, except for its eyes. The eyes - those deep, shiny, dewy-fresh eyes of reptiles, so startling in their ancient, scaly bodies - looked perplexed, not frightened exactly, but lost in an impersonal way, as if trying to get their bearings.
There, where the turtle straddled the road, a freshwater swamp lay on either side. In its twenty-five million-year-old trek from one swamp to another, it had suddenly found itself on a modern highway, an asphalt strip that bisected its world with no points of reference. It stood bewildered, its roots momentarily cut. It was queer to think that such a small and exploited land as ours can still harbor such apparitions as this strange and savage bit of reptilian life.
I went over and picked it up carefully by the back edge of the shell. I thought briefly of taking it to the Audubon sanctuary, and even more briefly of turtle soup. But as it turned its snake-like head and stared back at me with that impersonal, insulated gaze, I realized what I really wanted was to stay there and talk to it, to hold what converse we could manage across our vertebrate class lines - to talk turtle, for once. If nothing else, I felt that I might gradually absorb from it a patient readiness for thought, saying nothing, but suddenly striking out in purposeful action.
But as I held it there, like a divining rod above the heated highway, I realized how clogged our lines of communication were with myth, prejudice, and irrational fears. The snapping turtle, an American native, bears one of the most complex relationships to humans of any reptile. Iroquois Indians used the dried shells as rattles and drums in ceremonial dances. In New England it used to be common for families to keep a snapper in a hog swill barrel until it was fat enough to transfer to the soup pot. Yet its appearance and formidable striking capabilities have given the snapper an unfortunate and ill-deserved reputation. Turtle literature almost invariably describes it as "savage," "voracious," "mean," "sullen," - in a word, a bad character. For generations, children were taught that these "vicious" snappers drag cute, helpless ducklings down to a watery death, and chomp off the toes and fingers of unwary swimmers. In many areas such ingrained ignorance led to attempts to exterminate this reptile.
Fortunately, modern herpetologists have come to the defense of this much-maligned beast. This so-called "ravenous" carnivore actually consumes much more vegetable matter and carrion than animal life, and it's "ferocious" behavior exists largely on land - that is, when provoked while out of its normal habitat. In the water, the snapper tends to avoid humans. You are much more likely to be attacked by a swan than a snapping turtle.
But the snapper's eyes seemed to say to me that whatever moral I wanted from it, I would have to draw myself. So I set the turtle down on the other side of the highway and watched it zigzag off, dragging its Stegosaurian tail through the grass down into the sallow swamp, where it settled slowly from sight like a wide stone.
(Listen to an audio version of this essay at http://streams.wgbh.org/online/play.php?xml=cape/finch_turtle.xml&template=cainan).
http://www.wgbh.org/cainan/article?item_id=2814932&parent_id=0&blurb_item_id=2814952