It’s turtles all the way up and down

"Turtles are biting today” said one of the anglers at the Lake Campbell fishing pier. One of the fellows, who his friend called “The Turtle Master,” said that they had caught 10 painted turtles and a couple of big snappers (snapping turtles). He had the pictures to prove it.

I watched as the Turtle Master reeled in another painted turtle. He used needle-nose pliers to easily unhook it saying “If they swallow the hook, I just cut the line.” Then he dropped the turtle on the dock and it to my surprise, it immediately began to crawl down the long dock toward shore and safety. “That one has been caught before; he knows how to get off the dock,” said the Turtle Master.

He added “They’ll bite you, but they only take skin, the snappers will take bone.” What a contrast between the two turtle species in size, coloration, and attitude.

For a naturalist, simply knowing the name of a critter isn’t enough. The name should be attached to some knowledge of the animal’s life history. I am reminded of the quote “there goes the vicar.” The phrase is attributed to Herbert Stoddard (1889-1970), an American naturalist who believed that we shouldn’t just know the scientific name of a species; we should also know its behaviors and habitat needs.

Stoddard said “People who saw a vicar also knew about that person’s role in the community.” So, what about the painted turtle? – glad you asked.

There was little information on South Dakota turtles until 2000 when Dr. Ken Higgins and Graduate Student Sara Bandas at SDSU published a field guide, a 36-page booklet available free from https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/extension_circ/484/.

Higgins, a well-known Federal wildlife biologist and university professor, was the son of a commercial fisherman on the Illinois River. Higgins often told stories of walking the river mud flats in winter and poking a pole into the mud. He said “when I heard a “thunk,” I had hit a turtle shell. He dug it up and took it to the fish market in the trunk of the car. Turtle meat is prized for soups and gumbos. Higgins wrote about his hard-scrabble childhood in a memoir titled “Childhood Memories from the West Bank of the Illinois River” (Pine Hill Press, 2004).

South Dakota has seven native species of turtles, all aquatic except the box turtle that can be found in pastures. The painted turtle is the most common native turtle. They get their name from the vibrant markings of green, brown, orange and red. A big one might weigh one pound at age 6, and they can live for 20+ years. They often bask on logs. Painted turtles are omnivorous, meaning that they eat a variety of food - aquatic plants, insects, and small fish.

During winter months, painted turtles bury into soft mud. They enter a condition called “torpor,” which means a semi-dormant period of inactivity and low metabolism.

Females lay eggs in clutches of 5–15 eggs in a shallow nest excavated on sandy shorelines. An unusual feature of their life history is that sex determination depends on the temperature in the nest; high temperatures (high 80’s) producing females and low temperatures producing males. Juveniles remain in the nest over the first winter before emerging the following spring.

How do you help a turtle cross the road? Yes, there are rules. First, release the turtle on the side of the road it was heading toward. Pick it up by the back of the shell. It will probably stay inside the shell but be aware, painted turtles have two reactions to being picked up – they may scratch and/or empty their bladder. I have personal experience. I had rescued a painted turtle from the road, and when I held it near the car window to show my grandkids, the car got – well - wetted – good thing the window was up.

I asked the two anglers if they had caught any fish. “Fishing is slow today, except for the stripers, they’ll bite a bare hook.” The angler was referring to the white bass, a common sport fish in East River lakes. White bass are famous as a schooling fish, and I have seen schools disrupting the calm surface of Lake Campbell in the mornings as they feed. This morning a school of small (6-inch-long) white bass was in the vicinity of the fishing dock. They are so aggressive that they will strike any shiny object, so yes, I believed the story that they were catching them on a bare hook.

The guys were calling them stripers because of their prominent horizontal stripes on the white body.

The GFP biologists call them white bass (Morone chrysops - “chrysops” is Latin for yellow eye). They are laterally compressed with deep bodies like a sunfish. They have two dorsal fins, the first with very sticky spines. White bass are carnivores and have a fast growth rate. The 4 to 6-inch fish in the schools around the dock were probably just 3-month- old. The huge forage base of plankton fosters fast growth. Later, the stripers will switch to fish.

It didn’t take long for my fishing friends to relate some white bass myths. “They taste like mud,” one angler said. This is the cooking myth.

Actually, white bass are good to eat after the red meat along the lateral line is removed. I spared the guys a lecture about fish muscle – the red muscle is used for constant swimming so it has a lot of red blood cells and quick-energy fats. Most of fish is white muscle, which is used for burst-speed swimming.

Then one fellow said that the white bass population in Lake Campbell would never be great because the fish migrate into tributaries to spawn and Lake Campbell has only one tributary, little, low-flow Battle Creek. “I saw them spawning on uTube - huge schools and a fish on every cast,” one guy said. Yes, their upstream spring spawning runs are legend, but white bass also successfully spawn on wind-swept rocky points and shorelines in a lake. Females release thousands of eggs which must attach to a substrate (plant, log, rock) for development.

Fishery surveys of Lake Campbell have always found white bass in moderate numbers, but Lake Poinsett has more. There are no creel limits on this species. A trophy size white bass is 18-inches or longer. In South Dakota you get a Proud Angler Award for catching a large fish. For white bass it is a fish greater than 2 lbs. The state record white bass weighed 4 pounds 6 ounces caught in 1999 in Blue Dog Lake.

The guys on the dock said “We’ve caught four yellow perch, you want’em.” One fellow said “Walleye taste like what you cook them in, but yellow perch have a certain flavor that make them the best eating fish.

When I accepted the fish, he said, “There, a perfect day of fishing, caught a few fish and don’t have to clean’em.”