SEX IN THE CITY COUNTRY

We have a beautiful 4-acre pond. When the weather is halfway bearable, I am in my kayak spying on and photographing pond dwellers for an embarrassing number of hours a day. I have photographed microscopic beasts that live inside the surface of the pond. Not below it, not above it. Inside it! I have snuck up on herons and been chased across the water by a muskrat. I will never feel like an expert because every visit brings some new bird, animal, or plant for my viewing pleasure. But I know enough to tell you this: that pond can best be described as Copulation Station.

Dragonflies and damselflies don’t live very long so they don’t waste any time checking things off their bucket lists. Their first five “to do” items are mate, mate, mate, mate, and mate. It’s an Odonata Orgy every summer. And they are very kinky beings––you can find threesomes, foursomes, etc.—depends on how much room to line up on the leaf.

Ducks. If you were not a feminist before, you’d shape up after watching ducks mate. After pulling the feathers on her neck, he stands on her back and forces her head under water. You get 20 ducks mating on your pond and it’s like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre if it had occurred at a water park. Splashing, screaming, flapping. 

One June afternoon I was privy to an event that made all others not just pale by comparison but completely disappear. On the western edge of our woods is a wetlands area. You have to walk through some difficult forest to get there, climbing over logs, sliding down stream banks, prying yourself loose from the greenbriers that grab your clothing. I tried so hard not to make any noise while walking through the woods, slipping my toes under the leaves, avoiding twigs, stifling sneezes until my sinuses nearly ruptured. I had placed an old wooden chair in a spot behind a huge oak in the wetland, so that I wouldn’t be spotted as I watched and photographed water birds. I wore brown and green clothing to blend in with the leaves, but to the herons and eagles, my quiet approach looked as though I’d arrived in a rainbow-striped hot air balloon while playing the bagpipes and tap dancing. They seldom stuck around. I had to sit quietly for hours until they returned to the swamp, if they returned.

That’s just what I was doing one day when I heard a mournful sound, a groan from the edge of the water maybe a hundred feet away. I couldn’t spot anything. Rising as slowly as possible, camera at the ready, I moved a few yards closer and hunkered down. Something was breathing with great effort. Loudly. Frequently. Oh, lord, I hoped it wasn’t an injured deer dying in pain. The prudent thing to do would have been to move away from, not toward, this sound. As I moved closer, I saw movement in the water right at the shoreline. 
Turns out, this was not a case where a big sound was coming from something surprisingly small. No, no. It was coming from something surprisingly huge. Maybe 15 inches across, just under the surface of the murky water. 

And then it rose up out of the water and crawled onto the shore. Just it’s two front feet––the rest stayed under water. Those two front feet had long nails. Over an inch. I moved closer because he didn’t seem to notice me crouching there.

Now he stood up, rising to a height of perhaps 9 inches. I trained my telephoto lens on him, turned the focus ring, and stifled a scream. Though this is a wild area with no human traffic other than me, I had not expected to find a prehistoric creature. I moved to within 20 feet.

This was a turtle, the biggest and ugliest turtle I’d ever seen. I grew up on a lake, so I’d seen big old snappers. This one was at least 16 inches across, but more impressively, he was massive in bulk. From carapace to plastron (upper to lower shell) he was 6 or 7 inches. Between the shells he was all muscle––there was likely 20 pounds of meat in there.
His nose had three pointed prongs. And something you never want to see––his tongue was a horrid pink snake that would have made Gene Simmons quiver with envy. 4 out of 5 of my relatives have dogs smaller than this turtle. And because I knew no one would believe what I had seen, I took picture after picture of this writhing, snorting, heaving beast. I went through 2 rolls of 36 shots each and ran out of film. I figured he’d be gone by the time I went back for more film, but I made the difficult trek home and back, running, tripping, sliding. It took about 30 minutes. And wonder of wonders, he was still there when I returned.

I assumed the position and readied my camera once more. And then he began to rise up off the earth. That’s because his mate––on top of whom he was clamped, it turns out–– was rising up from under the water, a place I’m pretty sure she was sick of being. It would seem, it did appear, I do believe that I had just shot 2-1/2 rolls of film filled entirely with snapping turtle porn. It was like a dream come true.

I didn’t initially identify what was going on in those photos when I emailed them to everyone I knew. They all commented on how ugly that turtle was, how big. When I did ask them to look more closely, my inbox went silent. 

If you look up all the definitions of horny*––having horns or hornlike projections, being tough and calloused, desirous of sexual activity––I think you will agree that that guy owns them all.

* From the Free Online Dictionary

More on giant snappers:


http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&oe=UTF-8&q=giant+snapping+turtles&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=Ru9WTd_JNoG4twfFnvGVDQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CDwQsAQwAw&biw=1417&bih=690