Snapping Turtle and Tadpoles
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been posting pictures from the old beaver dam in the woods behind our house. And this is why we were back there in the first place. On June 29, 2025, Sam was out in the yard when one of the boys who live next door suddenly appeared with a bucket. He came up to Sam, held out the bucket, and said, “Is this your turtle?” And, of course, inside the bucket was this turtle.
So, Sam graciously accepted the turtle, who was about the size of my hand and was small enough that he could be handled by the back of the shell. It’s clearly a snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, you can tell by the perpetually angry expression and the plastron plate on his underside that doesn’t quite allow him to pull inside his shell all the way.
We briefly contemplated letting him live in our goldfish pond, but decided that he would be better off in a somewhat larger body of water, so back we went to the woods. When we got to where the beaver dam used to be, we let him go and he abruptly disappeared into the water weeds.
Then, upon looking around, we saw that there was a huge flush of tadpoles at the time. I don’t know what kind of tadpoles these are, they could be any of the several types of small frogs or toads that we have around here. The one at the bottom that is circled has even gotten its hind legs already.
Tadpoles are terrible swimmers, and are ludicrously easy to catch.
While messing with the tadpoles, we suddenly noticed a head poking up out of the water, slowly coming our way.
It was our friend the snapping turtle (at least we are pretty sure it was the same one, it was exactly the same size as the one we released.
He cruised right over, and was clearly coming over to see about those tadpoles.
It was actually a pretty relaxed encounter. The turtle cruised over into the tadpole crowd and just kind of hung out in the middle of them. Every few minutes, he would abruptly shoot out his head and snap up a tadpole, too quickly to photograph. He wasn’t greedy or going into a frenzy, so I expect he probably continued grazing on the tadpole swarm for some time, maybe days.
So, the turtle was happy, and the tadpoles had so little sense of self-preservation that one couldn’t really say that they were unhappy, so it was all good.
I love this phrasing.
“the tadpoles had so little sense of self-preservation that one couldn’t really say that they were unhappy”
Having seen the expressionless faces/reactions of tadpoles as they are victimized by pond-insect-larva attacks, I’d have to agree.