Driveways mean nothing to Turtle Lady
By adamg - 6/8/09 - 8:18 am
Dan Miller can't get out of his own driveway because some lady parked her SUV right there when she spotted a turtle crossing the road and she had to stop right away to help it cross the street.
... I walk toward her and she turns more frantic, reminding me to "shussssssh" as she starts talking about the turtle habitat and how it's unfortunate that turtles try to cross the road and get hit by uncaring cars.
I nod in agreement, putting on my best politically correct face but still wondering why she chooses to block my driveway in her quest to save the turtle population. ...
Comments
Turtle Causes 3-Car Collision On Route 9
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/19690100/detail.html
Definitely turtle season - laying eggs?
On a bike ride on Sat, a woman had stopped in the road for a turtle, and I pulled the mediumish snapper back to safety in Westboro. I end up seeing alot of these during bike rides and always stop to get them off the road.
Yesterday evening , I was on a large baseball field in Southboro when I noticed a rock right in the middle of the field - but it was moving. Another snapper, about a foot long making its way across about 200 yards of grass.
Are females laying their eggs?
i had to evade one on a bike
i had to evade one on a bike ride last weekend as well, somewhere nw of fitchburg, in vt or nh
Eggs it is
Depending on the weather, prime egg-laying season for snapping turtles is, er, now. Snapping turtles rarely leave the water except to lay eggs. They bury them in a hole and then walk away and never see them again.
The turtles you see on the roads now (I saw a 2-3 foot snapper at the Arboretum this morning) are the females looking for a good place to lay eggs.
More from Mass Audubon.
what does the frequent mention of SUV have to do with this story
This turtle-saving woman was driving... gasp! an SUV! Why the frequent mention of it? Interesting blog entry, nonetheless.
For the record, my mother also saves turtles crossing streets; she doesn't drive an SUV; and she isn't politically correct.
Possibly because ...
An SUV is a hulking behemoth that is more effective at blocking one's driveway than a SmartCar that one could push out of the way with a single hand.
true, true
Okay, you have a point there.
Not really
A car in the way is a car in the way, and it's not going to move until the owner moves it*. The fact that it was an SUV is irrelevant to the story, yet you see this all the time in the news. The blogger (and Adam, apparently) seem to have this incredible dislike for SUV's, even though there really is no definition of an SUV. SUV's seem to be vehicles that range from RAV4's, Elements and Forresters to Yukons and Excursions, yet people want to refer to all of them as "behemoths".
* OK, years ago, I found my VW Beetle lifted out of its parking spot under the central artery (remember that???) and rolled onto the grass. In its place was a van. Figure out the rest. ;-)
I like turtles...
...but were there any zombies?
Turtle fecundity
I'd theorize that Nature counts both traffic-related turtle squashing events and their average crossing-the-road velocity in her calculation of reproductive replacement rates.
Frogs, too. Where I grew up in Virginia, zillion-frog columns would hop in unison across low-lying roads on certain nights of the year, driven by lust or madness from one swampy place to another. Suddenly encountering one of these rivers of hopping frog-flesh in your headlights at 35mph, it was literally impossible to avoid sending some number of them to their heavenly reward.
With the road all green and slimy in the morning, one kenned that the forces of sex and death had roiled the fen on yestereve. It was gross, but you can't get all save-the-frogs about it.
clap clap clap.
"With the road all green and slimy in the morning, one kenned that the forces of sex and death had roiled the fen on yestereve."
Fenwayguy FTW.