Snap! Goes The Turtle
The raging reptiles of doom are invading North Dakota! A woman narrowly escaped one of their more insidious traps: a herd of snapping turtles artfully disguised as harmless flowers.
Betty Kratzke was seeing green Thursday.
The day started ordinarily enough.
Kratzke’s brother, Ron Berg, and brother-in-law, Darrell Perry, were going to Kratzke’s house to help install a new front door. By the time Perry arrived, Berg was already there, holding a baby snapping turtle in his hands.
About an hour later, 44 turtles were transported with a cardboard box from Kratzke’s yard at 1021 13th Street S.E. to the James River, about a block away.
“It was the greatest experience in a long time, you know,” Perry said. “Golly.”
Snapping turtles live to be decades old, said Gene Van Eeckhout, fishery biologist with the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, and can weigh about 30 to 40 pounds. And while they may be small and sweet as babies, they don’t make nice pets.
“They’re not very friendly to play with,” Van Eeckhout said.
Ms. Kratzke apparently doesn't realize how lucky she was. The turtles were just waiting for her to get close enough, say while gardening, then they would have had her. Oh, sure, they're small, but there are a lot of them. Snapping turtles have a long history of this sort of ambush. You never hear about it because they're so good at it. That's why we defoliate all around the Crabitat. No snapping turtles disguised as mums can get near the place.
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Blue Crab Boulevard » Teenage Mutant Duck-Chomping Turtles — Thursday, 27 September , 2007 @ 3:18 pm
By Bleepless, Saturday, 8 September , 2007 @ 7:20 pm
You’ve heard of human wave attacks by the Chinese Commies? You wonder where they learned it? Well, there you have it.