When my mom called me outside to look at it, I thought it was a dinosaur. A real live dinosaur right in my backyard! It was giant and scaly. The shell on its back had bumps and ridges and looked very, very old, so I was convinced that a dinosaur sat in the grass where we have picnics.
As I walked closer to it, Mom stopped me and held me back. “No closer. That is snapping turtle. A great big snapping turtle, and if you scare it, it will bite.”
I didn’t go any closer. In fact, I stayed on the porch all day long, well out of reach.
The snapping turtle walked as slow as a dinosaur through our grass. I wondered where it was going, what it had in mind. Maybe it was just stopping by on its way to a friend’s house? Or to another pond?
Mom told me that snappers live in the water, so this one had to be going somewhere.
I watched and watched as it marched along to wherever it was going. But I had to run and tell my mom when the turtle marched right under our back porch.
Mom got on the phone right away and called every animal person she knew because she didn’t want a dangerous dinosaur creature living so close. I listened and kept peeking over the side of the porch to see what the snapper was doing.
“It’s digging! It’s digging!” I said, and she nodded. The person on the other end of the line told her snapping turtles come out of the water in the springtime and sometimes travel up to a mile to lay their eggs. They dig a little hole to sit in and can lay around 40 eggs. That would certainly be a lot of little turtle babies in my backyard.
We left the turtle alone for the rest of the day. Eventually she walked away as slowly and as silently as she came. We must have made too much noise because she didn’t leave any eggs behind. We couldn’t really help it, though. It’s not every day a dinosaur shows up in your backyard.
~The End~
Photographs Copyright © 2009 Wikipedia
Copyright © 2009 by Karrie McAllister