Close Encounters of the Alligator Snapper Kind: Part 2

What animal weighs up to 250 pounds, is clad in a horny armored shell, has claws like a bear and jagged jaws that can bite your hand off? Why, it's the Alligator Snapping Turtle. These fearsome and ancient-looking beasts would not look out of place next to a dinosaur. Terrifically strong and feisty, they can hiss like a locomotive and bellow like a bull. They can live over 100 years.

They are most populous in the Southeastern United States. Over the years, I've encountered them in various sizes in the Dallas-Ft Worth area of Texas. I even saw one in the pond at Fair Park in Dallas, a stone's throw from the famed Cotton Bowl Stadium. Young Alligator snappers and the Common snapping turtles look similar, with the main difference being in the set of their eyes. Common snapper's eyes are on the top of their head, and the alligator snapper's eyes are on the side of their head, and are more forward facing.

The Dallas area is situated in the Trinity River Basin and there are many man made lakes as well as a considerable number of wetlands and marshes. The variety of terrain is remarkable, with many differing micro-ecosystems. My encounter with a giant snapper was in a thickly overgrown swampland near Mansfield, Texas, to the southwest of Dallas. That swamp looks more like the bayou country of East Texas and Louisiana than anywhere else in DFW.

The company I worked for at the time had relocated to Mansfield, and there was an old two-lane blacktop road running along the edge of the swamp. Some of the employees were using it as a shortcut while the main road was being upgraded. I used to slow down through that stretch of the road, watching for wildlife. Often I saw great blue herons, beavers, raccoons, possums and egrets.

One morning, through the haze of a low fog I saw a large, hulking shape, smack in the middle of the road. Slowing to a crawl, I soon could soon make out the unmistakable profile of a huge snapper- the back ridges of the shell were as jagged as a buzz-saw. I knew a little about the habits of the gator snappers; they rarely leave the water except to lay eggs. I reasoned that this venerable giant was a female. I had the somewhat comical thought that this had to be "the mother of all snapping turtles".

I pulled my small car off the road, on the uphill side from the swamp. The snapper was heading in that direction, but had ducked defensively into her shell. I was concerned that a co-worker, in a hurry to get to work and driving too fast, would be unable to stop, and would smash into her. I put on the car's emergency flashers and went over to her. The turtle was definitely the biggest I had ever seen. The shell was about a yard long and arched up almost to my knees. The hornlike shell scales were remarkably long and pointed.

I knew enough to approach slowly from behind. I began to shove on the massive shell with one leg. I could budge the turtle only about six inches by heaving with most of the strength in my legs. In my job, I routinely moved barrels of plastic slag weighing 150 pounds a couple of feet using the same technique. The mass of the turtle seemed at least equal to one of the barrels and quite possibly more.

Things got interesting when, after a few shoves, she suddenly swung her neck around one side, snapping at me with a loud pop. It was quite startling, but she couldn't really reach me. I shifted strategy, alternating sides of the snapper. I would wave my hands on one side, and when she turned to bite, I would jump to the other side and give another shove. When I had pushed her about three-quarters of the way across the road, one of my co-workers approached in his car.

He slowed down and pulled up almost alongside me. It was one of my friends at the plant, a very intelligent Nigerian engineer. He was nonetheless entirely flummoxed and flabbergasted at the spectacle on the roadside. His brow furrowed, his eyes bulged and his jaw dropped. He gasped as the snapper hissed and chomped at me. He was thinking: "What is that monstrous creature?!! And why is he fighting with it!!?"

I tried to suppress a laugh at his reaction. I motioned for him to come and help me. Instead, he rolled his eyes, tromped the accelerator, and took off! I turned back to my task. When I finally got the snapper off the road and up onto the hill a bit, he sped past me again, going the other way!

I was winded by the exertion and sweating profusely. I leaned on the car for a minute to catch my breath. My Nigerian friend sped past again, this time heading back towards the plant. By then, the snapper was now plodding slowly uphill, so I got in my car and left for the plant. When I arrived about twenty minutes later, several people were in the plant's entryway. My friend was in the middle of them, still in a highly agitated state, relaying a bizarre tale of the morning's events.

In his version, I was practically wrestling with a man-eating dragon. The others looked stunned and alarmed, and were darting rapid glances between my friend and I. The whole scenario there struck me as being utterly hilarious, and for a few minutes, I couldn't stop laughing long enough to explain.

I finally was able to settle down and tell my version, but from the looks on their faces they thought we were either both crazy or trying to pull off some kind of strange hoax. For the next couple of days I had to answer quite a few skeptical inquiries. I finally brought in a library book to prove the existence, appearance and size of the legendary Alligator Snapping Turtle.