Letter: Dams have brought big changes to turtles' lifestyles

Talk about it

I just finished reading Scott Rall’s column about wildlife survival and was interested in the fact that he found the female turtle laying her eggs in his food plot.

I had found just about the same thing a couple years ago near Lime Lake in Avoca, where a female snapper had crawled up a high bank to lay her eggs in a corn field. These eggs require about 60 days to hatch, and then the young turtles have to travel to water and get into it before freeze up so they can get down in the lake bottom and hibernate over winter.

Pre-dam days, when these bodies of water had a fair amount of sandy shoreline, the turtles laid their eggs in that sand where the sun warmed them and aided in the hatching. When hatched, the young turtles had just a short trip to water. It is a wonder that any of them survive anymore with washed-out banks around all these dammed-up lakes.

Instead of a sandy shoreline, Paul Langseth may have even had some turtles hatching on his shoreline years back before the advent of his impossible-to-figure- out, 15-feet-high bank. So, “go figure.”

Tags: opinion, letters, outdoors