I recenly heard a news anchorperson say that if you help a turtle cross the road by picking it up and carrying it to the other side, it would spend the rest of its life trying to find its way back to the point where it was before it was picked up. Could this possibly be true? Is it as good for the turtle as it is for you, to help in this situation?
I’m no expert on turtle behavior by any means, but that soulds like a big ol’ steaming pile of horse crap if you ask me. Why would the turtle care where it was when you pick it up? Where did the news anchor get this info?
Like Bratman, I’m not an expert. However, I do this all the time and I don’t believe that they try to find their way back. Usually they just keep right on walking.
I take them across the road, but I put them on the side they were heading towards.
Well, pooh, I thought this thread was gonna be about turtle jokes. “Why did the turtle cross the road?” “To get away from the ABC film crew.”
Anyway, when you see turtles crossing the road, they usually have a good reason, such as the place where they always lay their eggs is on the other side. Given this, it would be peculiar indeed for turtles to be genetically hard-wired to give up the quest for an egg-laying site in order to try to go back to the place where for some reason they were interrupted in their quest. They’d waste a lot of time and egg-laying opportunity. I’d think that turtles that were that easily distracted from the all-important business of egg-laying would soon be removed from the gene pool.
When you see a turtle crossing a busy road, do not help it across, run it down. You may save that turtle, but you are allowing the “bad road crossing decesions gene” to be passed on to the next generation, thereby causing countless turtle deaths. Killer!
Some turtles, such as the Box Turtle which once roamed Northern Virginia in large numbers, return to the place of their birth during the mating cycle. I used to see lots of turtles confronting an unpleasant demise along newly paved roads, particularly the Algonquian Parkway in Loudoun County. How they know where to go is a mystery to me, but they seem to have a direction-finding system which is not interrupted by moving them a few feet.
Regardless of what that reporter may have said, there was a certain amount of humor to be found when I would pull over, run out into the road, and set a turtle down in the grass. Often, they wouldn’t bother to protect themselves by pulling in; they’d just race off in a straight line from wherever I’d set them down, still walking while I was holding them. And why not? Wouldn’t you do the same if you had a hot date lined up?
One time I just couldn’t help but keeping one. He was a beat-up old-timer who was so venerable that the scales on his shell had busted off–the most I could count was forty. He was headed for one of the newest and busiest subdivisions in town. I took him home with me and turned him loose in my fenced-in garden, which had a mulberry tree in it (fact: just about any mulberry tree in NoVa has a box turtle hanging about nearby). He was relatively happy, I think, but each year the guy would end up in the same corner of the yard, desperately scratching against the wall of the town house, more-or-less in the direction I found him traveling the first time I saw him. After a couple of weeks, he’d calm down and go back to lounging under the hot-tub.
I sincerely hope the guy got laid again.
Yes Sofa, they become quite…intent at a certain time of the year. I reconize a couple of box turtles from scars on their backs that live around my place.