Turtles fighting is one of the best past times in nature. Slow and unpredictable. Enjoy this traveler's adventure into Georgia's nature habitat.
Flying a small puddle-jumper into Augusta Regional Airport at Bush Field in GA surrounded by 20 golfing enthusiasts headed for the Masters Tournament wasn’t my idea of fun when my company sent me to validate a technical manual I had written for the local Army base. Everyone was buzzing about getting rental cars to get to a hotel on “Bobby Jones Highway”. Just the thought of spending a full day in the hot sun watching sweaty people playing golf all week made me queasy. I would be working indoors and going back to a hotel room with a good air conditioner.
Even though the weather was comfortable when we landed, I was still getting my stomach back where it belonged after the way the little plane took the turbulence. I was used to main airports and big jets and walking directly off into terminals, with moving sidewalks and escalators leading to the baggage carousels. I was a little in shock walking down the rolling metal stairs, unable to remember the last time I had walked on tarmac to get into an air terminal.
Arriving on a Monday worked for me. And starting long shifts Tuesday were fine because we got pizza and salads delivered frequently so we wouldn’t break stride. The tests were frustrating because the manuals had been written without the latest revisions of equipment, and this was our final chance to fix things; all the changes had to be incorporated with no room for error.
By Friday we were running the last sets of procedures and a little after 6 p.m. we cheered the successful completion of the project. The equipment worked and the tech manual was good to go.
One of the enlisted techs invited me and my co-worker to a party the following day near, of all things, the golf course. My co-worker found something else to do and I had never gotten around to changing my flight home from Sunday to Saturday, so I was stuck hanging around for an extra day anyway. I was still uninterested in the golf, so he suggested a surprise tour, and that sounded fine.
He picked me up the next morning, along with two others from the project, and we headed for a Nature reserve. One thing I had missed all week was some outdoor exercise. The dog days of the Georgia summer hadn’t set in yet, so a long walk in a bucolic setting sounded perfect.
We took the Parkway north from the Bobby Jones Expressway for about 3 miles and turned off onto a smooth dirt road to the “Audubon Society Brickyard Ponds” and registered at a little fish shack. The main trail joined others and then several miles of boardwalk that meandered through reeds of a large natural swamp, and then over water to an island. All about us were birds, berry bushes, and chipmunks. The wetlands teemed with waterfowl and herons. It was a back-to-nature day I needed badly.
Some kids ran ahead of us as we started down the main path to the swamp trail. We bypassed a butterfly garden, noticing the movement of many delicate slow-moving, colorful wings against a delicious backdrop of bright blue and salmon blooms.
Chipmunks darted around us in full view, stopping to sit up and stare, and goldfinches perched in the high branches of tall blue spruces and serenaded us with their gurgling chortles and little mewing kitten cries.
Ahead, the five-foot boardwalk was built above the thick black swamp mud and eventually went out across the water. Heavy wooden railings provided protection from stepping off, as well as something sturdy to lean on for picture-taking or just observing.
The boardwalk continued straight about thirty feet toward a little island. On each side were wide open waterways with reeds and cattails popping up all through the shallows. Small forms on the water in the distance were groups of Canada Geese on one side and on the other side several pairs of long-necked Mute Swans, followed by their giant brown progeny.
After the straightaway, the boardwalk made a right-angle along the little island’s coast to a large square platform built right in the water that afforded a wide-angle view of that side of the swamp. This observation deck had several benches and a constant turnover of visitors from both directions. As we arrived, an older gentleman pointed down into the water for us to see something by the large piling that held up one corner of the deck.
“Wow!” my companion almost yelled. “Look at that huge turtle!”
And then I saw him. Like a scene from Deep Space Nine, this behemoth moved in slow motion through the dark water below us. He cruised from the shadows of the observation deck to an area where I could his full size, over two-feet long from beak to tip-of-tail, and about 18 inches in diameter. We both inhaled as we watched it.
“He lives just under the platform,” the man said. “I come here often and see him a lot.”
As the Snapping Turtle got about 15 feet away in the clear shallow water, he grew motionless, possibly to feed. And as large as he was, after a few minutes of inactivity, he began to lose our attention and we continued on toward the island. The boardwalk ended with the solid ground and a dirt footpath continued clockwise around the coastal perimeter.
We talked as we circled the island and began walking back along the other side.
The area was quieter now, but the boardwalk was beckoning us and we started back and approached the observation deck again. We looked around for the huge snapper and spotted him under the water back near his post. His very size held our attention for a long time, generating friendly conversation with others who were also watching him from that vantage point.
Eventually we continued on to the straightaway across the shallow open water toward the mainland where the swamp trail had begun. Here, though, things took an unexpected turn. About five people were lined up along the railing, talking excitedly and pointing to something in the water.
My companion asked a young man what he was looking at and he pointed and said it was a “really big snapping turtle”. We were now about 50 feet past the observation deck, but we assumed it must be the same one we had been watching there.
“Wow! He’s huge!” I heard, and managed to get a look, and he was. Even if he were the same one, you just couldn’t help but stare. The water was so shallow and clear, it could have been a National Geographic movie.
But then the snapper moved into even shallower water where the angled sunlight exposed him like a spotlight. We all noticed at once that he only had one eye. The other eye was non-existent, covered over evenly with something like barnacles that coated his entire exterior, from his head and shell to his tail. Someone yelled out “Hey! It’s old One-Eye!”
Several people chuckled and the name stuck.
Then as we watched, a strange underwater drama began to play out. Old One-Eye was still moving toward the center of our viewing area, albeit so slowly it was almost imperceptible, as a crowd of about fifteen adults and children watched him. Then from our right, another group came walking from the direction of the observation deck, talking excitedly and following something else in the water. It was the huge Snapper from the observation deck post, moving through the water in our direction also.
As about twenty people watched, these two huge creatures moved slowly through the underwater vegetation straight toward each other. We could all see them on a collision course, but they seemed oblivious of each other. Six feet of water and pond weed separated them, then five, four, three, two, until as we watched, they were virtually nose-to-nose and came up short. There, suddenly dead in the water, each apparently was suddenly faced with, what? a mate? an adversary? None of us knew.
All the talking stopped and dead silence reigned on the boardwalk as we waited to see what would happen. But nothing happened. They were both frozen in time–and so were we. A full minute went by, maybe two – and no one was breathing. We had become mesmerized by their stillness, when suddenly there was a flash of action, and none of us were really sure what we had seen.
One of the turtles, moving faster than anything that size had the right to move, had suddenly shot away at a right angle from the other and hurtled through the water toward us, heading underneath the boardwalk where we stood, kicking up a flurry of mud in the process. The other monster was hot on his tail.
If we had been in a boat, it would have tipped over when all of us rushed from leaning over one boardwalk railing to the opposite side to see the chase continue. Suddenly someone yelled “Old One-Eye’s chasing him!” And we could see for just a moment that indeed the pursuer was the one-eyed turtle. The other had apparently crossed some invisible underwater boundary and found himself face to face with the new territory’s sentry.
The pursued shot out under the boardwalk and out the other side, muddying the water to mask his flight and making the observation process difficult. Now all we could see were two trails of bubbles coming to the surface about a foot apart and trailing away to the open water beyond. It was more exciting than a horse race, primarily because of the apprehension that there might be a violent ending if one didn’t escape. Two such huge creatures might churn the water in combat for who knows how long.
But after a few moments of suspense, the farthest bubble trail began a wide circle to the left and the bubble trail farther back continued straight ahead and then slowed to a stop. Old One-Eye had “lost the scent’. His bubbles continued to come to the surface in the same place for many seconds as the other trail continued at the same steady pace, circling in a wide U-turn until it headed back toward the boardwalk about 20 feet to our left. And neither had come up for air!
We all heaved a sigh of relief, but what now? Old One-Eye’s bubble trail began to show he was slowly coming back home. The former pursued continued under the boardwalk way off to the side, aiming for the observation deck waters. Both bubble trails continued and half our group split off toward the deck to wait for the post turtle’s arrival. The rest of us finally saw the tired Old One-Eye, still releasing bubbles, return under the center of the boardwalk and reappear back in the shallow water where he seemed to live.
Someone called from the observation deck area. “This one’s back – and he seems OK.”
‘Yeah, this guy’s back too, like nothing happened,” someone near us answered, and we exhaled.
Old One-Eye took up his former position in the sun, his sightless side toward us.
Was that what made him the aggressor? Or did it have strictly to do with who crossed what boundary? Or maybe he was a hundred years old and the other one only 99? We didn’t get answers to any of those questions, but we certainly got more than we bargained for from a casual walk in the woods.
The suspense of that face-off between those two territorial boulder-sized Georgia snappers in an almost-turtle-war would stick with all of us. My friend took me to the airport the next day and we couldn’t stop talking about the day before. And in comparison with my technical manual, it was definitely the more interesting event.
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Wow! What an unexpected adventure! Sure beats playing golf in the hot sun. Ms. Thomas' writing held my interest and excitement. I could feel the excitement as though I was there myself. Ms. Thomas is an excellent writer.