Box turtles like keeping it close to home
One of the delights of spring is finding a female box turtle digging a hole that will become a nest. I find one or two every year in my ridge top hay field. Invariably, the nest is in the middle of one of my mowed paths.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Box turtle courtship continues into July. Males and females wander fields and forests and eventually encounter each other, seemingly at random. When a pair meets, the male circles the female, occasionally pushing her and biting her shell. These preliminary rituals may persist for an hour or more before mating occurs.
The male overcomes the obvious physical challenge of mating with a distinctly concave lower shell (the plastron) and surprising gymnastic ability. During the encounter, the male “stands” upright on the hind tip of his shell. He steadies himself by gripping the female’s shell with his rear feet.
A few weeks after mating, the female moves to high, dry, open ground to dig a shallow nest. Using only her hind legs, she digs out a small hole, just two or three inches deep. The nest’s depth is limited by the length of the female’s hind legs. Solar radiation provides the heat for incubation.
Incubation temperature determines the sex of the brood. Clutches incubated from 73 to 81 degrees Fahrenheit produce mostly males. If the incubation temperature exceeds 83 degrees F, mostly females are produced.
The nest hole is flask shaped — the bottom of the nest is wider than the opening at the top. Into the nest she drops four or five white, rubbery inch-long eggs. The female may take as long as five hours to lay the eggs. She then scoops dirt back into the nest and tamps down the soil with her legs and shell.
Approximately three months later, depending on soil temperature and moisture, the eggs hatch. Broods that hatch in October may overwinter in the nest. Turtles that hatch earlier dig their way out of the nest and immediately burrow beneath the leaf litter on the forest floor. Here they spend their first few years of life — hibernating through the winter, eating and growing in the summer.
I’ve always loved box turtles. I help them across busy roads when possible, and when my daughters were younger, I sometimes brought them home for show and tell. But I always returned them to the exact spot I found them because displaced box turtles rarely survive. It may seem that moving turtles found on the road to a place far from traffic would be best for the turtles. More likely, it’s a death sentence
Box turtles spend their entire lives, which may span 60 or 70 years, on just a few acres. They know every mud hole, hiding place, and food patch. If moved to an unfamiliar area, they’re likely to starve or be eaten by predators. But if you do take a box turtle home to show the kids, and I think that can be a great learning experience, return it a few days later to the place you found it.
As familiar as box turtles are to most people, there is another species, the wood turtle, that I suspect few have ever seen. Its range is more northern than the eastern box turtle, but both species occur in parts of Pennsylvania, Michigan and West Virginia’s eastern panhandle.
Wood turtles are recognized by their heavily sculpted carapace (upper shell). The annual rings on each scute (the horny plates that cover the shell) are raised and suggest a pyramid. Though wood turtles are forest creatures, they are rarely found far from water. At times they spend as much time in streams, swamps, bogs and wet meadows as they do on dry land.
Though both box and wood turtles spend much of their lives on land, they often soak in streams and ephemeral woodland pools; they are not tortoises. Tortoises are strictly terrestrial, and only three species inhabit the U.S. Desert tortoises are found in the southern portions of California, Nevada, and western Arizona. The Texas tortoise inhabits only south Texas. And the gopher tortoise lives only in Florida and the southern Gulf coast from eastern Louisiana to southern South Carolina.
XSend questions and comments to Dr. Scott Shalaway, R.D. 5, Cameron, W.Va. 26033 or via e-mail to sshalaway@aol.com