Tag Archives: Birdseye Hollow Park

Meet the Neighbors: Snapping Turtles

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Last week in this space we looked at our neighbors the bald eagles, one of which, as I mentioned, I had watched circling above the pond at Birdseye Hollow County Park.

As I strolled back toward the bridge, I encountered another of our neighbors, but instead of lifting my eyes high, I had to drop them down low. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, at first. Was that a large moss-covered rock? A closer look was met by a disgusted glare. Here was a creature that special effects movie genius Ray Harryhausen might have dreamed up, if he had been as imaginative as Mother Nature.

I speak, of course, of the snapping turtle.

They look like prehistoric monsters, and there’s a reason for that. They’ve been so successful that they’ve scarcely changed in 90 million years. Dinosaurs watched the snapper arise, and the snapper watched the dinosaurs disappear… assuming they deigned to pay attention. That asteroid crash may have killed off the dinos, but the snappers came through fine.

Snapping turtles were on hand when the Rocky Mountains pushed up toward the sky, and as ice ages came and went. They were here when the first human beings set their feet on our continent. When the first paleoindian tramped along Mud Creek through Birdseye Hollow, the snapping turtle wached with a jaundiced eye.

My first exerience with the snapper came when I was a small boy, playing at the pond near our home in Rhode Island. In a little sandy eddy, a tiny turtle slowly spun in the slow currents. It didn’t move – was it an iron turtle, floating just under the surface? I lifted it by the tail, and it DID in fact move. I had met my first snapping turtle, and gently, happily, set it back in the pond.

It’s just as well I didn’t meet a fullsized snapper, as an 18-inch carapace (shell) is not uncommon, along with a weight in the teens (a few get MUCH bigger), and their jaw is fierce (hence their name)… though not as powerful as legends have it. Still, had I been fool enough to tangle with one, an adult could have inflicted some memorable damage on a small boy.

In our neck of the woods, just about any pond of any size has a snapping turtle (or several snapping turtles). They’re mostly aquatic, and rarely leave the water – they hardly ever even sun themselves like many smaller turtles do. A mile upstream on that Rhode Island pond, a decade later, I would sometimes find a snapper basking on the bottom, a couple of feet below the surface, and thunk its carapace with my oar. It would ignore me, and rarely budge from its chosen location.

If you DO meet a snapping turtle on land, it’s probably on a mission – either laying eggs, or moving to a new pond, for reasons best known to itself. Since they’re good-sized predators they’re potentially dangerous, but my observation is that any injuries they cause are vanishingly rare. They’re also unlikely to kill all the fish in a pond, though they might, over a little time, snatch an entire flock of ducklings or goslings paddling along.

Here in New York, the snapping turtle is our state reptile, despite the fact that it’s seldom seen, and has just about no economic value. On the other hand, they’re marvelously impressive creatures. Snappers can live for decades, and individuals have been reliably dated at a hundred years of age. They’re 90 million years older than we are, and could still be here that long after we’re gone.

Meet the Neighbors: Bald Eagles

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A week or so back, I beat the heat and humidity to take a short early-morning hike at Birdseye Hollow County Park, near Bradford. It was just a half-mile out and then the same back, on a blue spur from the main Finger Lakes Trail, which runs right nearby. Once I was back into the parking area I took a walk across the bridge and out onto the earthen dam, so I could have a look at the pond.

Birdseye Hollow likes to slyly dish out surprises. Our younger son spotted a fisher here once. And on one occasion as I was hiking close to the pond, I was suddenly enveloped by a burst of butterflies… and what could be better than being approved by butterflies?

On this morning, as I looked out over the pond, I watched a bald eagle circling overhead.

I never saw an osprey until I was a grown man, and I never saw an eagle until I was a father. Now I live in a place where both are annual nesters, and where they are, if not commonplace, at least a part of a typical spring and summer. Truth be told, I’ve seen them locally at EVERY time of year.

Why did their numbers crash? Shooting played a role, and so did habitat destruction.

But both of these very large raptors depend on fish for their diets, a fact that drove both of them almost to extinction. In the years after World War II we went on a DDT binge, insisting it didn’t harm humans (ha), and wouldn’t kill anything but bugs. We now describe it as a persistent broad-spectrum pesticide – it kills lots of stuff, and it doesn’t break down very well. It stays in the environment, where it keeps on killing, for a long, long time.

Over time it flowed downhill, collecting in the ponds and streams, where it contaminated the fish. The eagles ate the fish, and built it up in their systems. It thinned out their eggshells, so that only a tiny few survived to hatch.

Radically reducing use of DDT, and improving its handling, gave our national bird a chance to recover, and recover it has. You can watch one circling at Birdseye Hollow or Mossy Bank, along the Conhocton, Chemung, or Canisteo, and mention it at home as a pleasing anecdote. It’s not the once-in-a-lifetime experience… or the NEVER-in-a-lifetime experience… that it used to be. But it still lifts your spirit, maybe even the more so considering how close we came to losing them.

Back as recently as our nation’s bicentennial, the entire state of New York could locate only a single eagles’ nest… which failed every year because of the thin eggshells.

Scientists worked out a challenging approach called hacking. One of them would climb to the nest while the parents were absent, remove the doomed eggs, and substitute an artificial one. The parents would incubate for the normal period of time, after which the scientists made another climb, replacing the dummy egg with a chick from a captive-breeding program.

The delighted parents successfully raised the youngster, and did the same for the next two years. When the male died the female paired with one of the hacked youngsters; they returned to the nest, and raised hacked hatchlings for five more years, until a pair of the original fosterlings made the nest their own, and successfully nested on their own.

In the same period, eaglet cages were set up at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, where eagles had nested in the past, and where DDT was pretty much absent. Scientists hand-raised eaglets, working from a blind so that the birds didn’t become habituated to humans. The first two birds nested successfully near Watertown five years later, while others have returned to Montezuma to nest.

They like to be near fish, and in recent years have worked their way up our rivers from the south. Now our home is their home, and we’re neighbors with eagles.