Turtles

Regenerative Subsistence Fauna Food
#1

Turtles.

I love turtles, I think they are cute. I was camping for five days in Northern Wisconisin and the UP, last week and caught three good sized turtles(two painted, one snapper). I let them go. I was just having fun. So today, I watch “Man vs. Wild” and see Bear eat a turtle, so I was thinking Hmmm…

This might be a good food source. Especially since I have a knack for finding them. Next onth I want to go on a week long wilderness trip and forage for all my food. Any tips on preparing turtles?

#2

I saw that episode. My Dad and I have watch these survival shows together as it’s about the only way I can connect with him. Bear sure does some stupid stuff but it does make for good tv.

The turtle he found was a yellow belled slider. He prepared it by chucking it on the fire till the shell was brittle and black. Then he just cracked it open with a knife. I found a slider once in an area I call the turtle graveyard. It seems that turtles go to this one area of the lakeside and die. I really wanted the shell but could not get it apart. The whole shell of these turtles are fused together. So, I decided to leave em in my woods to rot out. Bad idea as some animal ran off with him. I’ve since learned that I could have left him on an ant nest and they would have cleaned him up.

I also wanted to add that at MAPS the trapping guy named Guy showed us this saw that he got from a snapping turtle. It was about 4 inches long and was naturally serrated. The bone is found on the underside of the top shell right about the middle. I think there’s two of them. He was using it to trim arrow shafts and it worked real good.

#3

Yeah,

I like the other guy better, is it Les? On Survivor man. I agree Bear does a lot of crazy unneccesary stuff. Like eat elephant shit, scavange lion kills with the lions sitting right there, eat live snakes, etc. plus he’s really hyper active.

But When I was canoeing last week and it was gettingf dark and we were five miles from camp and couldn’t find a portage wee needed to find, I get a little hyper and frantically bushwacked through a thicket and a swamp and a beaver dam to find a portage, then swam out into the lake to signal my buddy to come up with the canoe. It worked good. Sometimes its good to get a little hyper.

I mean we could have spent the night in little debris huts but the mosquitos would’ve been bad…

but anyway, I am eating turtle next month!

#4

just be clean about it, salmonella is no joke.

#5

I wouldn’t recommend eating turtles. For two reasons. One, they are incredibly resilient to pollution you may not be resilient to, and secondly, they are on the top of the water food chain, eating everything.

On that note, I have eaten turtles before. It’s one of those Diminishing Return kind of things. Have you ever tried to kill a turtle before without getting pieces of shell in the meat? Or boiling a turtle and getting turtle poo in your soup? Or chiseling it while it is still alive to cut it’s throat… aghast! I prefer animals that die ‘cleanly’…

Ugh, the turtle is my spirit animal and I do have trouble fathoming actually eating one, unless a dead or dying turtle asked that of me.

#6

Hmmm…no, I haven’t.

Presently, because of their scarcity in the neighborhood we live I don’t hunt them. Usually I use here as many sustainable hunting practices as I can and know on grasshoppers, rats, mice, rabbits, possums, craw fish, fish, and legal birds, but rarely catch any nowadays. Unfortunately, as a child, I remember that I hunted ‘what moved,’ which included, exempting birds, all the neighbors I just mentioned in that last sentence and also arachnids, chipmunk, reptiles, insects, and amphibians.

#7

Even though one can eat all species of turtles here are a few things to think about. The big ones are very old and have accumulated much toxin, including way way more mercury than any fish. In Barnwell County, SC there were turtles exposed to radiation in a test pen and they out lived everything even the blackberry and pokeweed. As yummy as they are I would avoid eating them if possible unless in a pristine place with no natural hazards like selenium arsenic or uranium (where ever that is) and sticking to the little ones.

#8

As for cleanly killing the turtle, on that show he stabbed his knife into its chest below its head. Seemed to be a pretty quick/humane way to do it… I have never killed a turtle though. The last box turtle I found I moved to a safer spot away from a road :slight_smile: