10/01/2026
The pond comes alive at night…
Taking the yak out with the mom and pop alligator snappers the other night was wild.
I heard animal cries, raced down to see what the kerfuffle was all about.
Not entirely sure how the commotion started, but some poor animal had fallen in the water and gave its life to the beasts of the night.
I couldn’t get there fast enough, if I had it would still likely have been too late.
The thought of me trying to save a severely maimed animal from the jaws of an adult alligator snapper didn’t really sit well either.
Opportunistic feeding means these turtles depend on their environment to survive.
Even though they’ve grown accustomed to buffalo fish being their main staple here, it’s still very hard wired into their dna to be open to anything nature provides.
In this case it wasn’t 10 minutes from me hearing the last cries of this animal before they had taken it up under the banks to do their dirty work.
I took my kayak under the willow tree to investigate, and saw one turtle partially out of the water, leveraging power from its head and neck to lift the enormous mat of bank vegetation up and down in an effort to get at this animal that another turtle had already claimed.
Under which, was another turtle also positioned to have its share of the meal.
The caverns under these banks hold enough room for these turtles to get a breath of air without ever surfacing the visible parts of the pond.
The acoustics of them breathing is astounding.
The snapping of limbs in their chase of food reveals the force they have even in the weightlessness of water, beyond powerful.
These turtles continue to amaze me every day, and in this case many nights too when they are most active.
