Wild Things: A turtle for all ages

A painted turtle peers out of the water. Ed Kanze Photo

By ED KANZE

Among our turtles — those semi-mythical, all but magical, hard-shelled creatures of our ponds, lakes, wetlands and woods — my favorite is the painted. 

A painted turtle isn’t as big or as primordial looking as a snapper, another turtle I love. And it’s not able to climb trees, as a wood turtle can on occasion, or march cross-country as a box turtle is known to do, but all the same, I find myself greatly pleased every time I see one.

Maybe the appeal lies in the pleasingly rounded shape. Or in the handsome face, pin-striped and bright-eyed, that sometimes peers at us out of the water. (I was recently sitting on a riverbank photographing muskrats when I realized a painted turtle was floating right in front of me, giving me a close look.) Or maybe it’s the way they rise out of murky depths, materializing before us, and then turn and dive and paddle back where they came from. And maybe it’s all of the above, and more.

Turtles are ancient, as is well known by most 6-year-olds, and are not closely related to other reptiles. I was fascinated by them when I was 6, and when I find one in the wild, I still find it hard to think of anything else until the turtle swims away.

One of the great events of my childhood came when a second-grade teacher, Mrs. Coleman, needed a home for the two pond turtles, painteds or sliders, that she kept in her classroom. My dad was a colleague. He brought the thrilling word home one day that Mrs. Coleman wanted me to babysit her turtles for July and August. 

I was a second-grader myself. Suddenly I felt like the most important little boy in the world. Caring for two turtles seemed an enormous responsibility. I took it on with great seriousness, and my parents provided plenty of help. In September, the turtles went back to Mrs. Coleman, as healthy as when they arrived. I missed the turtles but glowed with pride.

At our place, we see painted turtles often. Because it’s hard to spot a largely black turtle in the dark water of our river, sightings take place mostly in spring and early fall, when the turtles crawl out of the water to bask in the sunshine. They need to warm their blood so they can digest food and perform other tasks of living. Basking is an efficient way to get the job done. We humans tend to think of reptiles including turtles as more primitive than ourselves, but reptiles use energy much more efficiently than we do, taking advantage of solar energy to warm their bodies rather than generating heat by metabolizing food. Maybe they’re not so primitive. After all, turtles have been around a lot longer than we have. Two hundred million years is a lot of time in which to evolve clever adaptations for energy-efficient living.

Female painted turtles tend to be larger than the males. In June, we see females on the sandy edges of our road, digging holes with their back feet and laying eggs. Females have more high-domed shells than the males, and their toenails are shorter. When you spy a male, the first thing you may notice are its long toenails. The nails help males hang on to females at mating time.

One painted turtle sighting stands out in my memory above all others. It was 1982 or thereabouts, in northern Westchester County, New York, and we’d had a hard early freeze. Ice had formed quickly, clear as a windowpane. I went shuffling across a shallow corner of a pond, and directly under my feet,  a painted turtle swam, glowing in the morning sunshine. I’m sure I gasped in delight. Somewhere, I hoped, the turtle would find a  place to come up for air.