September 25th, 2015

One day this past June, two city of Waterloo workers showed up at the Laurel Creek Outdoor Education Centre. They were doing some work on Beaver Creek Road, and said that they had found an injured snapping turtle in the ditch. I put on my snapping turtle gloves, and went to have a look. I found a female snapping turtle lying in the grass on her back. When I flipped her over, her neck flopped around in an unnatural way. It looked like she had been run over. But after been injured, she had somehow crawled off the road, laid her eggs on the side of the embankment, and then rolled down into the ditch. I counted twenty-nine eggs in the grass.

Snapping turtles bury their eggs in loose soil (our gravel road-sides work well), but this turtle was just not up to the task. So I gathered up the eggs, and buried them outside my office window where I had seen another snapping turtle lay eggs a couple of years ago. The humane society came and picked up the injured snapper and had it euthanized.

Baby snapping turtles generally emerge on warm days in the fall, so last week I wondered if I might see a hatchling digging its way out. However, grass had grown over the area where the eggs were buried, and I worried whether a baby would be able to dig its way through the sod.

So I dug up the eggs.

Twenty-three eggs were broken or had large dents in the side or them. Five eggs were still round, and one egg had hatched!

The baby was alive, but still had the yolk-sac attached to its belly. The protrusion provides nutrients to the growing turtle, but at this stage, prevented it from walking.

Since it was unable to move around, I decided to re-bury it. Three days later, it dug itself out. It still had a yolk-bulge, but not as big. A turtle website advised to place the baby on a wet paper towel until the yolk-sac was gone, and the turtle could walk around freely.

Two days later, it looked ready to roam, so I took it down to our pond and let it go.

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The other five eggs are still in the ground.

So hopefully there is a happy outcome here. There are lots of good will-to-live narratives to this story. I will update if anyone else hatches.