Highlights

The petite spotted turtle is one of the most inoffensive creatures in the Bioreserve. Spotted turtles are an aquatic species usually staying close to water, but at certain times of the year spend a considerable amount of time on land.

Along with the musk turtle, these black and yellow-spotted turtles are the smallest turtles found in the Bioreserve with a carapace (top shell) length of 3 to 5 inches. That carapace is black with small yellow spots scattered about, sometimes many on each scute (horny plate on the carapace) and sometimes only one and very rarely none. The yellow spotting also usually extends to the head, legs and tail. There is a large orange spot on each side of the turtle's head and the skin of the legs and inside edges of the shell usually also show some orange coloring. The underside shell (plastron) may be tan, light orange or yellow with a black splotch on each scute. With age these black areas expand. Some very old spotted turtles may have an almost completely black plastron.

Female spotted turtles are larger than males, have a convex plastron and normally have more spots on their carapace. They also have shorter tails than males, light red-orange eyes and yellow chins. Males have a concave plastron, long tail, brown eyes and a tan chin.

Spotted turtles avoid big water rivers and lakes. They live in small, quiet meadow streams, bogs, freshwater marshes and vernal pools thick with aquatic vegetation. Along the coast they frequent the upper reaches of brackish saltmarsh creeks and pools.

Their range is limited to the east coast of the United States, from southern Maine to mid-Florida and from the eastern slope of the Appalachian Mountains to the coast. Also, the Great Lakes area east from lower Michigan, Indiana and southern Ontario to western New York and northwestern Pennsylvania.

In early spring spotted turtles emerge from the mud and tangles of aquatic vegetation where they had brumated during the winter. Brumation is the cold-blooded reptilian equivalent to warm-blooded mammalian hibernation. 

During the hottest days of summer spotted turtles may also have a period of inactivity called estivation where the turtle burrows into the mud or leaf litter until cooler weather or rain reactivates it.

The spotted turtle's first meal of the spring season is often newly deposited wood frog and salamander eggs. They also eat algae and other aquatic vegetation, insects and other invertebrates and carrion. Like other mostly aquatic turtle species spotted turtles only eat in the water with their heads submerged..

Spotted turtles mate shortly after emerging in the spring and lay their eggs in May and June. Females lay their 3 to 4 eggs in a shallow hole dug in a sandy location in full sunlight. The sex of hatchlings is determined by soil temperature during incubation. Warm sunny days and the embryos within the eggs will develop as females. Cloudy, cool days and males will result. 

The eggs hatch by late August or September. The tiny, nickel-sized hatchlings are usually born with only one yellow spot on each scute. As they grow more spots develop.

Hatchlings immediately head for the lowest spot on the horizon which normally leads them to the nearest wetland area where they walk and swim about until they find the required spotted turtle habitat mix of water, sunlight, mud, vegetative cover and food. 

Due to their small size and docile nature spotted turtles are preyed upon by many species of turtle eating birds, mammals and fish. Raccoons with their sharp teeth and long digits, ending in sharp claws, can scoop them out of their shells. “Bet you can't eat just one” bullfrogs are a major baby turtle predator. 

Like most of our other turtle species, spotted turtles are in slow decline. Development of areas adjacent to wetlands, pollution from agricultural pesticides/herbicides, out of control “mosquito control,” road kills, illegal collection sadly mean this turtle may be heading toward extinction.

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You were meant to be wild! Return to the forest, your ancestral home - Part 8

An interesting and possibly tasty outdoor activity is foraging. Our earliest Homo sapiens relatives didn't have supermarkets or even agriculture. Hunting and gathering up wild food, that nature provides, was necessary for survival. Foraging is time and labor intensive, so for millions of years that was about all we did except for some singing and dancing and an occasional raid on our neighbors.

There wasn't time for much else until the invention of agriculture around 10,000 years ago. No longer dependent on hunting and gathering, this allowed folks to settle in permanent communities bringing about leisure time and with leisure came much of the mischief and more serious troubles that still plague our species today.

Were past Homo sapiens hunters and gatherers happier and less troubled than their descendants? Did they have more fulfilling, enjoyable lives with less anxiety and stress? How did our species survive for millions of years without constantly checking their cell phones? Let's take a step back to an earlier time.

Go forage!

Hickory nut cookies.

 

Wild foods, by definition, are not cultivated/domesticated plants or animals. Foraged wild plants include greens, roots, saps, herbs, berries, mushrooms, fruits and nuts. Here, today, we'll look at some nuts one can find in our neck of the woods.

Ethical foraging in overdeveloped southeastern New England means you take only what you need and always less than half of what you find in any particular location. If you find a few examples of a plant or choice wild food that's only growing in one location, leave it alone. Wild critters depend on these same food sources for survival. If foraging on private land, ask permission of the land owner. 

There are five species of hickory in New England. The tastiest hickory is the shagbark hickory. The pecan is also a hickory and closely related to our shagbark. The pecan, unfortunately, does not grow wild in New England. It is native to the forests in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys and bears the pecan nuts of commerce. Although shagbark nuts are smaller, their nut-meats are sweeter and more flavorful and make superior “pecan” pies and cookies.

Gathering chestnuts in the forest. The American chestnut once reigned as the king of deciduous hardwood trees in our native forest. Our local chestnuts often reached a height of 100 to 150 feet with a diameter of 10 to 12 feet. The chestnut is in the oak family. Unlike the oaks, which normally bear acorns abundantly every other year, chestnuts reliably produce an annual bounty of nuts. American Indians depended on this fall/winter staple as did many native wildlife species. American chestnuts were once an important forest crop. Early Appalachian homesteaders fattened their hogs on this free natural resource. In the 1800s rural folks gathered tons of chestnuts from the forest floor every autumn and shipped them to the burgeoning cities of the east coast. Every winter, while Jack Frost was nipping at their noses, thousands of city dwellers purchased “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” from street-corner chestnut roasters.

 

In the late 1800s someone imported Japanese chestnut trees into New York that carried the spores of an Asian chestnut blight fungus (Cryphonectria parasitica). Japanese and Chinese chestnuts evolved with the blight and over the millennia immunity developed in those chestnut species. Our American chestnut had no such immunity and millions of chestnut trees withered away and not one giant American chestnut tree exists today. Fortunately for the chestnut and us the blight does not kill the chestnut tree roots and new shoots continually sprout from old roots. Unfortunately as soon as these shoots become small chestnut trees, at ten to thirty feet in height and just as they begin to bear nuts, the blight fungus attacks and kills them back to the roots.

 

American hazelnuts papery appearing husks on left and husked nuts on right. We have two species of wild hazelnut in New England. The other hazelnut is the beaked hazelnut, photo below, and their husks are completely different, as you can see, from those of the American. Both local hazelnut species are similar in flavor to the European hazelnut, also known as filberts, available in local supermarkets. Out in the forest, local wildlife usually devours the wild hazelnut crop immediately upon ripening making it almost impossible for humans to gather any quantity of these tasty nuts.

 

The beaked hazelnut like the American hazelnut is a shrub, not a tree. It has a more restricted range than the latter, growing in open woodlands and forest edges from Georgia up the Appalachians to Canada's Maritime Provinces. In our area the beaked hazelnuts appear to be rarer than the American hazelnut and prefer growing in drier upland soils than the American. Beaked hazelnut shrubs grow to a height of eight to twelve feet. They sprout readily from rhizomes (root-like underground stems that have buds and roots). Under ideal growing conditions dense thickets of multiple stems grow from these rhizomes. The round to oval toothed leaves of beaked hazelnuts are shiny green and very similar, although usually more oval, than American hazelnut leaves.

 

Other nuts: There are other nuts that may be, depending on the year and weather conditions, available too. White oak trees usually bear abundant acorns every other year. Most acorns contain abundant tannins that make them very bitter and toxic if eaten in quantity. White oak acorns contain much less of these tannins and the tannins can be removed by soaking in water. The acorns can then be roasted, ground into flour, etc.

American beech trees bear beechnuts. Beechnuts are tiny, but packed with goodness. Rich in fat like most nuts and with major protein. Unfortunately beech leaf disease, another foreign disease caused by a nematode probably brought here from Japan, is currently destroying all our beech trees. 

Black walnut is not native to New England. It is a midwestern tree and in our neck of the woods has been widely planted for its valuable wood and large edible nuts. It is found throughout our area growing in urban parks, backyards and growing wild along roadsides and on abandoned/vacant farmland.

Let's go a-nutting this fall.

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