Found him in the skimmer this morning. My hand must feel more cozy than the basket as he chose to take a nap once I picked him up. I carried him across the street to the wildlife refuge marshy area. Be free, little 🐢
That looks like it might be a baby stinkpot (S. Odoratus)! They’re a kind of mud turtle, so marshes are their happy place.
Baby snappers have long tails, but it could also be one of those that lost its tail.If that’s what it is, that’s extra awesome! My grandma used to call me stinkpot (affectionately).
Oh and this one had his tail pulled in. I saw a little of it before he did so, and I was waiting to see if he’d redeploy it to judge if it was a snapper. His little claws and pointier nose made me lean that way. I had to usher a HUGE snapping turtle out of the road last week. He fortunately had just woken up from hibernation and was still groggy, so he wasn’t trying to take my hand off.
He probably took a nap because he was trapped in there and desperately trying to get out for hours and hours. Poor thing was probably exhausted as fuck trying to escape.
We keep frog “logs” around the pool, but critters always seem to congregate in the skimmers anyway. And i haven’t turned the pump on yet, so he wasn’t pulled in there by current. The basket was upside down on top of the widget thing that plugs the return line for winter, so he was dry and out of the water. But yeah water temp is 66°F/19°C, and my hands are comparatively warm. When I find ones this little, they normally tend to try to crawl out of my hands vs resting.