The Haverblog

Comes now John Anderies from our library, with his own turtle imagery:

This lass was laying eggs at the edge of the Duck Pond. Meanwhile, Dean Greg Kannerstein reports, “I have several times seen traffic on College Lane or Railroad Avenue come to a halt for five minutes or so as a turtle inched its way across the road. One year, a turtle on RR Avenue refused to move, and we had to get out of the car and prod it with a *long* stick for quite some time to get it out of there. No way was anyone going to pick it up.”

Excellent roundup of turtle facts here, including:

• The largest snapping turtle ever recorded was 18.5 in (47 cm) (carapace length).
• Weights of 35 to 45 pounds are reached (8 to 14 inch individuals).
• The heaviest snapping turtle ever caught in the wild weighed 68 lbs.
• The older snapping turtles get, the slower they grow, so the biggest individuals are possibly over 100 years old.

I’ve long heard stories about a giant snapping turtle that lives in the Duck Pond. Comes now a post on flickr showing what purports to be an image of our Nessie (Fordie?):

According to the poster (a former employee of Special Collections), that white square floating in the water is a cube of shredded wheat…which is probably about an inch long…which would make the head of the guy who’s about to eat it some 9″ long…such that the whole beast is probably bigger than the lid of a trashcan.

Here’s another shot, with geese for comparison. Yikes.