Little Turtles on Round Lake

It is hard to say how exactly it started.  My Great Uncle, a newspaper magnate from Pekin, Illinois, was color blind except that he could see the color yellow.  So his cars were always bright yellow, and in the turtle capture business Painted Tortoises, or as we called them Painters, had bright yellow streaks on their necks.  So I suppose to Uncle Foye's senses they stood out light beacons of color on an otherwise gray world.  Uncle Foye used to gather up his grandchildren and grandnephews in the summer and organize turtle hunts at the "secret turtle spot" which was actually a large marsh crossed by a gravel road which was also the boundary line between Indiana and Michigan.

It might also have been the entrepeneurial ambition of my oldest brother who caught turtles and sold them to the tourists at a summer resort hotel that was just down one door from our cottage.  Such beginnings get lost in time.

Whatever the start, I, as the third son, took up the same adolescent occupation of capturing baby turtles on the lake at our backdoor step and selling them to tourists.  In this market the smaller the turtle and the rarer the breed, the more the turtle was worth.  Painters were the bulk trade item as they were by far the most common, next being the small musk turtles we erroneously referred to as snappers, then came the diamondbacks, and for me the ultimate were the softshell turtles.  My eldest brother reputedly had captured what they called "alligator snappers" because of their tails -- I believe these were regular snapping turtles whose name had been usurped in our labeling by the stink-pots or musk turtles that we referred to as snappers.

When I say small, I think in terms of coins.  The baby musk turtles were slightly bigger than a dime, and at that size did not yet smell offensive.  The painters and diamondbacks ranged from the size of quarters to the size of fifty cent pieces.  The soft shells were the size of fifty cent pieces, occasionally a little smaller.  We caught larger turtles, but they were not worth much -- anything over the size of your hand was not worth bringing home.  This whole trade is now quite illegal, but back then it was an adventurous occupation for a young boy age 8 to 15.

Turtle catching was a skilled occupation.  You had to know where to look and you had to know what you were seeing when you looked.  That may sound odd, but you could take an unskilled kid out in the boat with you and they could look right at the head of a baby turtle and not see it.  An animal staying completely still can avoid detection by the average homo sapien.  But not an experienced turtle hunter who took in the area through his eyes with a meticulous zeal.  An experienced turtle hunter could not only tell a turtle's head poking up through the moss and weeds, but be able to tell where a turtle's head had been seconds previously.

In the course of developing that skill, the hunter's powers of observation with regards to all of nature increased.  Like the kid that spent his youth hunting, climbing, and hiking a woodland or mountain area -- our wilderness was a small fishing lake.  Such lakes are, or were, massive in their ability to sustain life of all types.  I can remember one day straining my eyes to see into some reeds and cattails on the far side of the lake where I had rowed up to.  It took my mind awhile to fully register the fact that I was looking at the only Bittern that I ever saw.  The bird was standing there stock still with its beak locked in a straight up position but somehow you could see its eyes on either side of the bottom of its beak which was facing me.  I did not move except to eventually quietly move, the Bittern never flew away.  On that occasion as on most turtle hunts, I was out by myself and the encounter with the Bittern was a one on one kind of thing.  If I were to hazard a bet, I would believe that nobody in that rural/resort county of Indiana had ever had such a close encounter with a Bittern, in fact it seems doubtful to me that anyone had had such an encounter with a Bittern and understood what they were looking at.

Turtle hunting was not for the faint hearted.  If you saw a wee head poked up through the moss, you did not necessarily see anything else.  Of course you knew where the rest of the turtle was, but beyond that everything was concealed.  In such a situation, nets did not work very well as you brought up a ton of moss and sometimes it slowed your uptake to the point the turtle was able to scramble to safety.  No that situation called for going from nearly petrified stillnes to an extremely quick grab of the hand, and you couldn't just skim the water you had to go down normally to your wrist with that plunge.  Now you might think, so what?  Well most people are not enchanted with the idea of putting their hand quickly, almost without thought, into the green goo we called moss that floated in the water.  They were even less inclined to do so if they had even a glimmering of an idea what lurked beneath the surface in the form of waterbugs, leaches and water snakes.  But, after awhile that was second nature.  Leaches were the primary concern and dousing them in salt usually rendered them harmless and caused them to roll off without harm

There were other ways to catch a turtle, all of which involved nets.  A net slightly shorter than a broom was favored.  You could not use a typical landing net because the holes in the net were too large to prevent the escape of a baby turtle.  We used landing net frames, but took off the nets they came with and replaced them with cisco nets. 

Catching turtles with nets required the same skills, plus additional net handling skills which involved knowing how deep to plunge the net before the rapid pull towards the surface.  If the scoop was too shallow a fast turtle could duck under fast enough to avoid the net.  If the scoop was too deep there might be too much moss caught which slowed the ascent or which would flip out of the net on the way up taking the turtle with it.  Netting also required skillful maneuvering to avoid impediments such as logs, reeds, etc.  The most difficult netting was the long net.  These were landing nets put at the end handles the length of a short fishing pole.  These nets were used when you were operating from the shore and the turtle was too far out to capture in any other way; the use of such a net required the same skills but needed much better hand eye coordination and the ability to assess the waterscape.

These all are skills that are obsolete, but the impact on a person's ability to observe is not.  One has to wonder at least a little what impact the restrictions aimed a preserving nature such as banning kids from catching and selling baby turtles will actually have on us as a people.  Will such protection result in nature not being seen?  If no one has reason to develop the skill to look and actually see, will such portions of nature in essence cease to exist? 

Little turtles are now safe from the predations of a family of predators which sought to take away their freedom.  Of course, because the current residents no longer understand the value of moss and weeds along the shore, they surreptiously introduce herbicides to remove them so they have clear clean water along "their lakefront."  So that now as they put their jet skis onto the water they do not have to fight through moss to get to the open water.  I wonder are the little turtles safer now?