Here is all you really need to know: it was May 2007. We arrived at Goose Creek State Park—and “turtle time” began.
My trusty companion (my husband, Mark) and I pulled into the primitive campground in our reliable blue Jeep. I jumped out before Mark even turned off the ignition, my feet landing on coarse tan sand layered with pine needles. Finally, I groaned. The trip from Durham had felt endless. As each moment of our two-and-a-half-hour drive ticked by, I had pictured—painfully—the herps and warblers we were surely missing.
Fate was already mocking me. As I inhaled the briny air to calm my frayed nerves and scanned the longleaf and loblolly pines draped with Spanish moss, movement caught my eye. A dull brown object, like an upside-down dinner plate, seemed to scuttle away.
Turtle.
“Mark—a turtle!” I yelled, and hurried forward. I caught up to a big female yellow-bellied slider leaving a strange trail of half-moon imprints in the sandy debris as her webbed feet propelled her along the forest floor. This sizeable female—distinguished by the faded yellow mask that sets her apart from North Carolina’s many other aquatic turtles—was moving away from Goose Creek, the waterway that winds toward the Pamlico Sound and once sheltered pirates like Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet.
Mark put it together before I did. “She’s going off to nest,” he said, with the confidence of a lifelong naturalist. And he was almost certainly right. In the Carolinas, yellow-bellied sliders typically nest in May and early June, often choosing a mesic spot away from water to lay eight to twelve creamy, oblong eggs. If the clutch escapes the attention of pilfering raccoons, tiny carnivorous hatchlings emerge after about two months, eventually growing into the omnivorous, sun-loving adults we all recognize—those familiar silhouettes on floating logs.
I snapped a few photos of our mama-to-be and then looked at Mark pointedly. “We have to start walking,” I said, suddenly stern, terrified we might miss one of Goose Creek’s natural wonders. There was a lot of ground to cover. The park has six interconnected trails, ranging from the short 0.4-mile Live Oak Trail, which passes an old cemetery and skirts the Pamlico Sound, to the 1.9-mile Goose Creek Trail, which drops into cypress swamp. I wanted to explore them all.
Our first goal was Flatty Creek, a small, mysterious stream that feeds the Pamlico River and ends in a sedge-and-sawgrass marsh that feels made for nesting herons, egrets, and rails. We started through pine woods that grew swampier with every step. As we neared the creek, we heard the buzzy trill of a Northern Parula, a tiny gray warbler with a yellow breast that seems perfectly at home in wet woods, gleaning insects from foliage.
We stepped onto a small footbridge and spotted a good-sized red-bellied watersnake. Mark glanced back at me with a satisfied smile and kept walking. A minute later we reached another footbridge. I leaned over the railing and stared into the brown-black water. Bright orange-yellow flecks winked in a shallow pool.
“Mark,” I hissed—sotto voce.
He didn’t hear me. He was already moving away.
Without thinking, I dropped to my knees and lunged forward, plunging my hand into the warm, tea-colored swamp. When I pulled it back out, my wet hand emerged triumphant: I had captured a spotted turtle.
“Mark! Mark!” I hollered, turtle in hand.
He hurried back, confused about why I was still at the bridge—until he saw my yellow-spotted prize. “Oh wow,” he said, his voice suddenly hushed. “A spotted turtle.”
For both of us, it was a first—a species to add to our herp life list. Spotted turtles aren’t especially common, and they carry a quiet vulnerability. Found in pockets of the Great Lakes region and along parts of the eastern U.S. coastal plain, these turtles of wet meadows and swamps have long been pressured by development and habitat drainage. After a few minutes, we carefully returned the tiny, four-inch turtle to its muddy home and continued on our way.
The day unfurled into marsh vistas and cypress swamps, beneath pine canopies that hid the secret lives of warblers and wrens. We half-imagined ourselves stumbling upon bobcats or bears—Goose Creek natives still present in the region. And then, late in the afternoon, after hours of birding and tree identification, one more surprise waited for us. On the trail back to the primitive camp, nestled in pine needles, we found an eastern box turtle. Bright-eyed and vividly patterned, with yellow stripes crisscrossing its brown carapace, it brought a whimsical smile to our faces—and sealed the day in our memory as true “turtle time” at Goose Creek State Park.
Sense of Place 