Eastern Box Turtles

In today's post intern Samantha Kaplan talks about our Eastern Box Turtle friends here at Fenner Nature Center!

We keep a lot of cool animals here at Fenner Nature Center, but our longest residents are our box turtles- Ruby and Tabitha. These ladies are around 45 years old and still have plenty of living left to do! Some box turtles in captivity have lived to be over 100 years old! What’s even more special about our box turtles is that Ruby has red eyes. Typically, only male box turtles have red eyes and females have yellow eyes.

Box turtles are especially sensitive to human activities which cause habitat loss. Additionally, box turtles have been very popular in the pet industry; so many turtles have been captured from the wild and sold as pets. Box turtles are also pretty slow growing and don’t reach reproductive age until 7-10 years old. Even after reaching maturity, they only lay 3-6 eggs once a year and they leave their nests completely unguarded for months until the eggs hatch.

In Michigan, box turtles are a species of special concern and state law prohibits anyone from catching them from the wild and keeping or selling them as pets. They have become rare in the southern and western parts of the state.

Even though it’s unlikely to see any box turtles in your backyard, you can always come to visit Ruby and Tabitha at Fenner!