I found my first Eastern Box Turtle in January of 1989. It was a Florida subspecies. What a fantastic experience that was. At the time I was in grad school and was a Teaching Assistant for a course on Ecology of the Everglades. We found all sorts of great things on that trip including indigo snakes, pygmy and diamondback rattlesnakes, cotton mouths, and a myriad of great birds. I’ve seen Eastern Box Turtles many times since, but it always makes my day when I come across one. I’ve always lived outside their normal range and came across them only while on trips.
I found the female box turtle in this sketch while visiting family in Tennessee. It was my kid’s first experience with one in the wild. It was a real thrill for them. Although she didn’t seem particularly big, the turtle in the drawing was about 20 years old. You can approximate the age by counting the growth rings on the turtle’s carapace. As they get older the rings wear down and it is hard to be very exact. Box Turtles can live up to fifty years!
Determining the gender of a box turtle is pretty easy if they are in your hand. Flip it over and look at the plastron (the hard “shell” of its abdomen). If there is a good sized depression, then you have a boy. If you can’t get your hands on it to flip the turtle over, the males have a flatter carapace (top shell), longer, wider tails, and red to orange eyes. The eyes of the females are more yellow-orange to brown. Honestly, I’ve never been that good at determining them by the eye color or carapace because there is so much individual variation.
Box turtles have hit hard times. They have very long lives and correspondingly slow reproductive rates. Pairing that with habitat loss, over-collection for the pet trade, increased predation from raccoons, road kills and other factors lead to a declining population. Hopefully we can figure a way to keep these great turtles around. In the words of one of my all time favorite professors, Doc Bothner, the Eastern Box Turtle is “One Classy Herp.”
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