Ornate Box Turtles

Ornate Box Turtles Interest Local Biologist

Hi! My name is Christina Mann, and I’m a Wildlife Biologist. Now, as a big-game hunter for over 50 years, you might think I’ve keyed in on game species like deer and elk, but I’m actually a Herpetologist studying reptiles, amphibians, and Caecilians.

Caecilians are a primarily fossorial (living underground) species that used to be in their own order, but have now been stuck with the amphibians. Amphibians should make you think of species like newts or salamanders, but there is nothing amphibian-like about caecilians. I thought I’d actually seen one in real life—not just the one floating in a bottle filled with formaldehyde in the college museum—when I spotted a pale snake-like creature underneath the ammo box of a geocache in Humboldt County, CA, one morning.

However, taxonomists decided to demote caecilians to the amphibian category, and the creature that slithered back into the earth must have been a blind snake, because they don’t live that far north of the equator. The soft science of taxonomy has always disappointed me. There’s not much science involved in trying to clump species into certain pigeonholes based on physical characteristics—more like a kid’s guessing game where the players (taxonomists) are always changing their minds about relativity.

Recently, I had a young male Ornate box turtle that had staked out his territory around my backyard beehives. One afternoon, I picked the little fellow up and walked down to the end of the cul-de-sac to show it to some neighbor children. Only the five-year-old girl was home with her grandpa, but I told her all about the little turtle.

It had been about two years since he hatched from his egg. The shell patterns were bright and new. I showed the girl his hinged plastron (bottom shell) and his long, thin tail with the cloaca near the end. A female turtle has a shorter, thicker tail with the cloaca nearer the body. Why the difference, you may ask? The female has to lay eggs through that thick tail, while the male transfers his sperm to her while he is precariously perched over her backside.

Cloaca is a Latin word meaning sewer, and all reptiles, amphibians, and birds have a single cloaca rather than two waste openings of higher animals. While mammals like humans produce urine that is filtered by their kidneys and held in a bladder, reptiles produce a white, pasty excretion called urea. Urea filters harmful ammonia via the liver and is directly expelled along with other waste matter (poop) through the cloaca. This allows birds, amphibians, and reptiles to conserve water. Although they do have kidneys, these animals do not have a bladder to store urine.

I could not let the little girl hold the turtle. You see, even healthy turtles can harbor Salmonella bacteria and make people sick if it gets in their mouth or nose. However, she got to name him—Sheldon. Now he has a red S in nail polish on the back left corner of his carapace (top shell). Although I am on VII with the females, I lost track somewhere of the number of males I’ve recorded, so along with Sheldon, there is Clive with a small red C on his shell and many others. Male turtles tend to roam more in search of females, while I have had the same two or three females winter under my porch for the last dozen years.

When I first moved back to Carlsbad in 2017, my neighbor told me about these box turtles roaming around their backyard. Using Roman numerals on the lower back of the carapace, females to the right of the tail (women are always right) and males to the left, in 2018, Granny was marked I, and she was recently seen by my neighbor.

Her shell is very tented (permanently raised) from the cat food she has been fed. Processed cat food contains too much protein, salt, and other preservatives that are detrimental to turtle well-care. The deformed shell can never be reversed and causes health problems which may shorten the life of the turtle. I like to catch grasshoppers and toss their headless bodies down in front of box turtles crossing my lawn. They snatch them up greedily and seem to skip on their merry way. While they may eat the occasional bit of fruit or green, their preferred food is insects.

Ornate box turtles have been recorded to live 49 years in captivity. My number two female Ornate only lived five years from first marking. Then she was caught crossing our road and suspiciously flattened right on the center line. I have seen Ornate box turtles many times on the dirt roads of the oilfields, and I always stop and move them out of the road in the same direction they are going.

A big problem with our native box turtle is that it is highly site-specific. It is said that if a box turtle is removed from its home and released in another area, it will die trying to return to its familiar habitat. Worse than that, however, is the fact that if their territories are bisected by a wall (for instance), they will not dig underneath it and form a new passage but will continue to travel back and forth looking for their former pathway until their strength runs out.

They do hibernate in holes in the ground during winter, but when they have lost their way or their territory is destroyed, they will find a hole or some structure to crawl under and die there. The species has little adaptability.

It is truly a shame that ornate box turtles can’t live here anymore. They are native to our prairie. Do you think that maybe some sort of compromise could be made so that little gaps would appear in the base of such a fence every 10 feet or so? That way the Ornate Box turtle could keep going on its jolly way, simply cutting across backyards where it once roamed freely. That way Sheldon could keep on going about his business for 20 or more years. That’s what I call a win-win.