Where Box Turtles Roam

finally, a happy ending

I was folding laundry at the kitchen table when my phone dinged. It was a text from Carolina Wildlife Conservation Center letting me know that the Eastern box turtle I had brought them was ready for release. After 22 days in captivity and a round of antibiotics, her aural abscess had healed. It was time for Daisy to come home.

For those of you not familiar with Daisy (a.k.a. patient 2024-0755) I wrote about finding her in a recent essay, Cause of Injury: Humans. Because Eastern box turtles, Terrapene carolina, have a home range of about 200 meters in diameter, it’s important for them to be released where they were found.

A box turtle will roam its small home range, where since infancy, it has learned (and memorized) where to find water, sun, shade, slugs, worms and other food, as well as mates and suitable spots for nesting and hibernating. 

Why such a small home range? Apparently, box turtles do not rely on scent or sight distance to find a mate, but must wait for habitual and chance encounters. It takes many years for a box turtle to mature, between 5 and 10 years, so staying close to where other box turtles are also roaming increases their chances of finding a mate. 

When relocated outside their home range, box turtles are compelled to wander. Ultimately, the stress of being in an unfamiliar area leads them to stop eating. If they don’t succumb to encounters with motor vehicles or predators along the way, they will die of starvation.

I have always had an affinity for turtles. When I was in the fifth grade, my father brought a box turtle home from a hunting trip. I kept it for a few days in a cardboard box, but let the turtle go in the woods behind our house after it refused to eat the iceberg lettuce I was trying to feed it. 

Even now, decades later, it makes me sad to think it probably didn’t survive, despite the heavily wooded habitat and nearby creek where my family lived at the time, which was about 30 miles north of Atlanta. I also feel a pang of guilt when thinking about the hatchling I found at the lake behind the clubhouse in that same neighborhood.

It was a yellow-bellied slider, from what I can recall, and no bigger than a silver dollar. I brought it home with the intention of keeping it as a pet. My mother agreed and even helped care for it while I was at school. One of my favorite childhood memories is of her catching house flies and feeding the baby turtle with a pair of tweezers.

This was before the Internet and Google, so we likely consulted the family’s set of blue-bound Encyclopedia Britannicas or checked a book out from the library to learn about turtles and their diet. We tried our best to care for the tiny reptile, but it did not remain a member of the family.

“Turtles can smell water,” my father said one afternoon, trying to explain how it had somehow escaped the enclosure and made its way off the back deck. “It’s probably down at the creek by now, maybe even in the river.”

I spent an hour or more walking the perimeter of our back yard, hoping to catch a glimpse of the tiny turtle making its way through the grass, but never found it. Now I know that many species of freshwater turtles are able to re-orient themselves when displaced or landlocked, so perhaps my father was right. I’ve also learned it’s not right to try and keep a wild thing.

Daisy’s release was much less dramatic. It was pretty uneventful really. Once back home, I filled a shallow dish with warm water and left it near the spot I chose to free her. I gently lifted her out of the box used for transport and placed her in the leaves beneath a wildly overgrown stand of azaleas with ample refuge to safely acclimate.

Here she is beneath the azaleas where I expected her to take off right away.

Alongside the azaleas, a wooded slope that separates our yard with the neighbor’s offers plenty of underbrush—Virginia creeper, Solomon's seal, mulberry trees, dogwood and patches of blackberry, as well as decaying logs for places to shelter and find food.

I kept a check on her, but it wasn’t long before I went out and she was nowhere to be seen. That night, I laid in bed and listened to crickets, frogs and some night bird sing. I wondered about Daisy. Was she on the move, or bedded down in the leaves? Was this nocturnal chorus familiar to her too?

I also wondered if I would see her again. The dogs and I often come across box turtles nesting in our yard, especially after a heavy rain. Sometimes, the eggs don’t hatch, either because they were not viable or sufficiently buried. Other times, the eggs are eaten by predators, like black snakes, opossum, and raccoons. 

Every once in a while, there is a hatchling, like the one I found about six years ago under the faded red push mower parked beneath our crawl space. That encounter was much too long ago to have been Daisy, which a wildlife rehabber estimated to be no more than two years old.

Still, it makes me hopeful to think that if she was born here in the yard, our paths may cross again. Until then, I will rename tonight’s full moon, Box Turtle Moon, and think of her safely tucked away, napping contently with a belly full of earthworms and slugs.

She stayed tucked in the leaves for a while before moving on. I was happy to get one last portrait before she was gone.

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