Was out scouting a few days ago and within 2 days found 5 box turtles. How many of you have box turtles in your area?

We do usually have to stop and move them on other side of road don’t like to see them get smashed

We have them. Best place to find a good population is in the tomato patch.

I saw a couple on the road a week ago. One I stopped and moved it across the road towards his line of travel. The other I was in too much traffic to stop and assist. He was right in the middle of the road. Hopefully he made it across without getting smashed by someone.


Your photo shows a very clean turtle compared to the ones I usually see. Most are somewhat muddy/dirty looking like they just crawled out of the dirt somewhere. Did you clean him up before the photo shoot.?

Bob, we had gotten some pretty good rain the morning these turtles were found. Both of these guys were found in the woods not much mud. The ones we find at the house are usually all mudded up!!

I love box turtles.

We have turtles everywhere.i counted 22 one day on my way to work
..over 18 miles...after a rain when we'd had a prolonged dry spell.

You'd never even know any was there until we get a rain
then the next morning they are all over the place

It's illegal for us to get them and sell them or I could make a fortune on box turtles.

One.guy near me got caught with 300 of them.

I regularly stop and move them.from the roadways if I can safely so they don't get hit and killed by idiots on the road.

Im always looking out for them.

I can spot them a mile away..like I can a beaver slide. Lol

I wanna see one quarter sized or smaller
I just wanna see one that little ..jerry saw one at the farm.

The smallest one I've ever saw was the size of a golf ball

How smalls.the smallest one yall ever seen?

Cathryn,
That's a pile of turtles!!! We typically find a few dozen a year from spring till fall.
A few years ago my daughter found one about the size of a golf ball. That is the smallest we have ever seen.

I used to have a female GSP that would regularly bring them home and lay them on the front porch. She never killed them, just wanted to show us her prize!!

Maybe not a box turtle , but I found this micro turtle in the middle of a big box store parking lot. I took it to safety.

About the size of a quarter.

We just passed one just now..we're on the way to the farm.but it wasn't where we could move it


My dog Runt is terrified of turtles which is crazy because he's not scared of anything.

I saw a picture of a super tiny one online and I'm determined I will find one that small.

I've only seen one in CT. Took some pics and moved it off the road.

we don't hAve them here

cool Turtle

I see them when I’m hunting in MO my buddy said if a person takes one as a pet they spend the rest of their life trying to get back where they came from. Might not be true but people should just leave them alone anyway.

I used to have a redbone coonhound that did the same.

I think ours are called Blanding's, very seldom seen now but were sort of common when I was a kid.

Pretty common here in southeast PA. I've got 6-7 shells i found in the woods over the years. I want to make slate turkey calls out of them.

They’re my airedales favorite toy. She finds them with ease and barks treed.

They are the Kansas state reptile. I had a German Shorthair that regularly would go on point when she found them while we were hunting. Around home, she would bring them to the house all the time. I was told by a dog trainer that lots of pointers do it.

We hunted with pointers for decades when I was younger, Brittiany's, GSP's Weimaraners, Vizslas, etc. It was common for them to lock up on a turtle.

I hunt with labs now so I no longer have that problem.

I didn't know they could climb trees.

A few years ago, I was working with an NRCS soil technician on a ranch in the sandhills in southwest Kansas. We came to a steel water tank at a windmill. The tank was dry (no cattle in the pasture at the time), but over the years, sandy soil had blown into a ramp under the windmill. The ramp of sand led right to the top of the steel tank. Inside the tank we saw some box turtles. We ended up removing 40 Ornate Box Turtles from the dry tank, some having buried themselves under dirt in the tank. All were still alive and turned loose outside of the tank. I then removed a foot or two of the dirt ramp so turtles couldn't end up falling into the tank again, at least hopefully for a few decades, until the wind might form another ramp.

And of course, neither of us thought to take pictures of all of them in the tank.