Eastern Box Turtles Making Love in the Rain

HANK WILDING'S JOURNAL: Nature can be pretty dadgum funny.
Take the Eastern Box Turtles I stumbled upon making love in the rain one April 2015 morn.

Darby and Joan, as I call them, were getting' busy, doggy style — the most practical and popular position in the Turtle Sutra.

Never mind that they show all the enthusiasm of a pair of rocks mating, they're clearly into each other, in more ways than one: Joan's plastron (the hinged underside of a box turtle's shell) had snapped shut on poor Darby's right rear foot. That's gotta hurt. Darby lasted an impressive thirty minutes — maybe because he couldn't get his dang foot loose.

After their slooooow ride, Joan moseyed away without so much as a sayonara to scarf down earthworms, plentiful after the rain, leaving her lover behind to sing "I Got Dem Flat On My Back Box Turtle Coitus Blues." The rain let up, but Darby was still in a fix. When he couldn't right himself after ten minutes of flailing around in the mud, bighearted ole Hank had to step in.

I'd never seen Darby before that I remember, but Joan is an old friend. (She even makes a cameo appearance in my colleague R. K. Cook's elaborate long-form music video, "Whatever Blows Your Skirt Up.") I've run into Joan all over Katydid Acres for at least ten years. (In the wild, extremely lucky box turtles can live 50-80 years, but Joan's cagey about her age.) Joan has a distinctive clubfoot (right front leg) — no way to tell if it's a congenital defect or the result of an accident.

I observed her laying eggs that June, which is good news, as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) currently lists Terrapene carolina as a vulnerable species. Shrinking habitat, vehicle strikes, fire mortality, increasing egg predation — the threats are many and dire.

I don't know about you, folks, but I can't imagine an America without box turtles. So, by all means help them cross the road, but DON'T buy one from a pet store. And if you see one in the wild, be wise and leave it there. The perils of the natural world can't hold a candle to the horrors of captivity.

Hank out!

Видео Eastern Box Turtles Making Love in the Rain канала R. K. Cook