Today on my ride into work, I almost hit a large snapping turtle at the bottom of the Mountain Oaks descent up in Bluff Park. It was in the curve right before the covered bridge, and it wasn’t moving so I knew it had no hope of making it across the street without getting hit. I tried to scare it off, but it wouldn’t move. About a minute or two later, a nice older lady came around the curve and asked if I needed any help. I said sure, do you have a blanket or something to help me move this turtle? She got one of those mesh carpets you lay on a floor to keep a rug from sliding on a hardwood floor out of her trunk and handed it to me. I started to pick up the turtle and everything was fine as I started to pick it up. I had lifted it about a foot off the ground at the spot where it’s feet were finally starting to lift off the ground and it snapped HARD up and to the right toward my right arm. It couldn’t quite reach me, but the lady screamed and I very quickly set the turtle back down. By this time, there was another car stopped behind the first lady’s car and a pick-up truck had stopped coming the other way with another car behind it. A guy got out of the pick-up truck with a shovel, but by this point the turtle had crawled on top of the mesh. I started to drag the mesh over to the side of the road and the guy in the pick-up truck picked up the other side of the mesh and we got the turtle off the road where it promptly crawled and fell about 4 feet down into a drainage opening. I could see it at the bottom and it was right side up and moving so I thought it must be ok. I went back later after work, and looked inside the drainage ditch and there was no sign of the turtle – so I think it must have made it back down to the creek. From my first effort at picking it up, I’d say it weighed somewhere between 5-10 pounds. That’s a lot of turtle for that high up on a mountain in Birmingham – who knows what it must be eating to get that big. I hope it isn’t chipmunks, squirrels and/or small cats.
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