Canvassing salt marsh islands on a windy March morning

Deep Sleeper

By Ben Atkinson

March 25, 2004:  The frigid water stung as I immersed my naked arm shoulder deep.  Reaching into the blindness of a muck-bottomed pool, feeling for the familiar dome of a terrapin shell—I hoped to find a sleeper in the darkness.

I wondered to myself, What possessed me to disturb a creature in the middle of its winter hibernation?  I pondered the audacity of it all, but my insatiable curiosity about turtles kept my hand fishing in the mud until I almost couldn't take the piercing cold any longer.  My hand landed on the form I had tapped, but it only came up grasping an empty shell.

We had been canvassing salt marsh islands, wearing ungainly waders and tightly zipped coats on a windy, early March morning, having paddled across the choppy waters in an old aluminum canoe.  We were tapping the mud, like well-diggers divining for underground springs, probing the unknown mucky depths with long stick-poles, hoping to feel the familiar dull thud of a sleeping terrapin.

The salt marsh in March

Dr. Wood and his students had not done much in the way of hibernation studies for over a decade, and I was dead set on finding a proper pond.*  Something in the challenge, in being the new guy on the marsh, in the camaraderie of my newfound friends, and in the air of honest field research awakened my nerves and kept me searching for our Holy Grail—for the “Diamonds of the Marsh.”

We never found a terrapin that day, nor the previous one when we searched another location, but we did find sites that seemed promising, and we made plans to set out seining as soon as chest waders arrived in the mail.  I was sad to know I wouldn't be able to stick around long enough for the next expedition, but I knew the mission was in good hands.