painted turtle – Lee Duigon

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We had our painted turtle, Clemmy, for 18 years. I fished him out of a badly polluted stream when he was still a baby. He wasn’t in very good shape, but a diet of hamburger meat and other goodies soon put him to rights.

Painted turtles have a reputation for being skittish, but Clemmy was as tame as could be. He used to stretch out his neck so you could scratch his lower jaw. Fed by hand every day, usually with whatever we were having for supper: that did the trick. If we were having scallops or lobster, he’d climb out of his tank and make a beeline for the table. He should have known we wouldn’t forget to save some for him.

Once upon a time Patty put a little turtle figurine in his tank, and was shocked when he went into a courtship ritual with it. Live and learn.

And of course we’d take him on vacation with us, wherever we went.

I’m missing him, just now.

Hi, Mr. Nature here. And I promised “Unknowable” he would see a turtle’s courtship dance today, so here it is. There’s actually quite a lot of video on this subject, but most of it’s a little muddled.

The male painted turtle has the long claws for gently caressing the female. The female is larger than the male in this species.

Most North American water turtles are closely related, even if they look very different from one species to another, so it’s not unusual to see a young, inexperienced painted turtle trying to court a false map turtle or a red-eared slider.

Our poor turtle was trying to court a ceramic turtle, which produced from him a very long and drawn-out courtship ritual during which he tried every trick in the book. We did not foresee this when we thought this would be a nice little decorative touch for his surroundings, and installed the fake turtle. He couldn’t tell it from the real thing, and it must have been a trying experience for him.