Wood Turtle

Smart enough that it turns up regularly in discussions of reptile intelligence. In laboratory experiments from the mid-twentieth century, wood turtles ran mazes about as well as laboratory rats, and later work has shown they have good spatial memory, can learn to associate cues with food, and navigate large home ranges in the wild with apparent familiarity, returning to specific feeding patches, basking sites, and hibernation spots year after year. The worm-stomping behaviour also looks like a learned foraging technique. None of this makes a turtle a genius, but it undercuts the idea that turtles are simply slow and unresponsive.

It is a way of getting earthworms to come out of the ground. The wood turtle stands on moist soil and rhythmically thumps the ground, alternating its two front feet and sometimes rocking the front rim of its shell down against the earth. The vibrations resemble those made by rain or by a digging mole, and earthworms respond by coming to the surface, apparently to escape, where the turtle eats them. Herring gulls, some plovers, and human worm-charming competitors use the same principle. It is one of the few well-documented cases of a reptile using a self-generated signal to flush out prey.

Several slow pressures acting on a slow animal. Wood turtles take 15 to 20 years to start breeding and rely on a steady supply of adults living for decades, so anything that kills adults faster than they can be replaced pushes a population down with no quick recovery. Streamside forest has been cleared and broken up by roads and farming; turtles crossing roads and moving through hayfields are killed by cars and mowers; nest predators like raccoons and skunks, boosted by human food and habitat, eat most nests; and the turtle's good looks and calm temperament have made it a target for collectors. Removing even a few adults a year from a wild group can doom it over time.

You should not take one from the wild, and in nearly all of its range doing so is illegal. Wild wood turtle populations are declining specifically because animals are removed from them, and every adult matters. The species is kept and bred by experienced keepers, and a captive-bred wood turtle with proper documentation is a responsive, interactive, long-lived pet, but it needs a large outdoor enclosure with clean water, a varied omnivorous diet, and a commitment measured in decades. Any wood turtle found crossing a road should simply be moved a short way in the direction it was already heading and left alone.