Nature Done Wright

When I walked outside on Saturday, I found a dead baby snapping turtle on our front walk. Today, I found three more on my driveway. The shells on three of them were intact.

Snapping turtles lay their eggs in our yard around Memorial Day each year, and the eggs typically hatch 60 days or more later. I have found many baby turtles in the driveway, but never dead ones.

Any idea what killed them? (I'm not sure, although I did photograph a local raptor with a baby snapper in its mouth in our backyard a decade ago.)

The tiny turtle in the photo above had been picked clean and had bees on it. (Below, a photo of the shell with a quarter for scale.)