Eastern box turtles on the move across the limestone valleys

Eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina) are still on the move in the limestone valleys.¹ Eight were logged between August 8 and August 26, from the farm country west of Reading to the wooded hills toward Boyertown and south into Lancaster County, one of them right in the heart of the valley on August 15. Late summer is the easiest time of year to meet one: a high-domed shell about the size of two cupped hands, dark brown or black with a scatter of yellow and orange marks, working slowly along a field edge, a woods road, or, too often, the shoulder of a paved one.

What sets a box turtle apart from every other turtle here is the hinge across the lower shell. When threatened it pulls in head and legs and shuts the plastron up against the upper shell front and back, sealing itself completely. A snapping turtle or a painted turtle can't do that. If it opens up again, get a look at the eyes: males usually have red or orange eyes, females brown.

This time of year they are eating what the season drops. Box turtles forage by day and take almost anything, earthworms, slugs and insects early in the summer, then shifting toward fungi and fallen fruit as those come on in late summer and fall. A turtle picking through a patch of mushrooms or under a wild grape or mayapple is doing ordinary early-September work. Seeds pass through it intact, so a turtle that eats fruit in one spot and wanders off carries the next generation of that plant somewhere new.

The wandering, though, happens on a small scale. A box turtle spends its life (sixty years is not unusual, and some go well past that) in a home range of a few acres, and it knows that ground. Move one across the county and it will try to walk home. Move it across a road and it will usually try to cross back. That is why the right thing to do with a turtle in the road is to carry it to the side it was already heading toward, and no farther. Later in the fall, as the nights cool, each one digs into loose soil under the leaf litter, often in the same place it used the year before, and waits out the winter in a torpor a few inches underground.

A slow animal that lives in a few acres for six decades and has to cross the same roads every year is exactly the kind that can disappear from a patch of woods while still looking common everywhere else. iNaturalist flags the species as threatened; it carries no federal listing. In these valleys, where woodlots sit between fields and subdivisions and every one of them is edged by pavement, the road shoulder is where most people will meet one.