Turtle Terror

This post has nothing to do about cats but was too weird not to share.

Every morning and throughout the day I have to “police” our yard due to a neighbor throwing stuff that is harmful to our dogs over the fence (documented in my Is Your Neighbor This Bad blog).

So today I’m heading back to the house to let the dogs in when I see this!

I get closer and it’s a BIG turtle. I can’t tell if he’s real because he’s not moving. So I go inside and think about it, call Matt (who was on his way to PA) not sure what to do. I don’t want to call Animal Control if it’s a joke but then again don’t want to get close enough to see if it’s dead (that occurred to me since we found rat poison in our yard) or a fake. It’s freakishly large to find in a suburb backyard.

So while I’m standing at the patio door looking at it, it rises up on these huge thick legs and walks across the backyard. I go for the phone and convince AC to send someone out.

They are here within 15 minutes. A gal gets out of the try and snaps on latex gloves. Tough Chick! - she’s going to pick up that monster with her hands.

I follow her into my backyard and she walks over to the turtle and stares at it. “Are you going to pick it up” I ask her fascinated that she’d even try. “No way I’m picking that up with my hands" she said and goes back to her truck. Whew – I’m not a nervous Nellie female after all and it really is as big as I thought.

She comes back with a cat carrier which she places in front of the turtle as if he’s going to walk into it. “He’s just going to walk into that?” I ask and she whips out a baton that turns into a long stick and she prods him into the carrier which he begins to bite! But he’s too big to fit into the carrier!

Sounding a bit like Chief Brody in Jaws when he tells Quinn “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” I said “you’re gonna need a bigger carrier”. She doesn’t have a bigger one. I offer to go get one of ours but she turns the carrier slightly so he can go in at an angle and in he goes – filling up the entire carrier! And this is a regular sized carrier – not a little kitten sized one.

It was a huge snapping Turtle with razor sharp jags on his back shell and sharp things on his tail. She said he likely came from Mt. Trashmore which is close but at least 3 blocks away. I told her that it must have taken him his entire life time to walk that distance but she says no they are fast. I still don’t know how he got into our fenced yard but she said they can get through anything.

Happy Ending! She immediately took him right back to Mt. Trashmore and set him free.

To cap off my horrible Monday start of the work week experience – there was a HUGE spider in my office. Luckily for me, a co-worker took care of that for me.