The Turtle of Alexandra Park

On the Loiterers Resistance Movement trip to Boggart Hole Clough last weekend, i heard that there were supposedly "turtles" in the "boating lake" (really more of a duck pond) in Alexandra Park - so, the next time i happened to be nearby, i decided to go and have a look...

I wasn't really expecting to see anything, as i'd been there a few times previously to see what kind of birds frequented the "lake" (and once seen a Little Grebe, but otherwise only the usual Mallards, Coots, Moorhens, Mute Swans and Canada Geese), and was somewhat skeptical about the rumour anyway, but... after a half-circuit of the lake, i noticed a half-submerged log with a small roundish thing about halfway down it, got my binoculars out, and saw that, while pretty tiny (maybe 10cm total length), it was indisputably a turtle! It didn't seem to be moving very much, presumably basking in what was left of the sunlight (although it wasn't a particularly sunny day), but after going the rest of the way round the pond to see if there were any interesting birds or other turtles and returning to it, it had turned round to face the other direction.

Due to its small size and distance, and the light conditions, the photos i got of it were sadly somewhat blurred, but it is unmistakeably a turtle - these 2 were about the best ones:





One of the more blurred images, uncropped, with a duck in the picture to show scale:



There was also this log, which, while obviously pareidolia, did look rather like it could be mistaken for the head of a huge alligator or other lake monster:



While i only saw one small turtle, a local drunk did approach me unbidden while i was glancing at an information board detailing species of bird that could be seen there, firstly to tell me about the "little terns" that lived there, and then when i mentioned turtles to tell me a rather incoherent story of "snapper turtles" "big enough to take your hand off", and how he got cautioned by the police for "digging around in the mud trying to catch one for his little nephew"... so, who knows, something bigger might be in there...

(This isn't actually the first time that drunk people have approached me at park lakes to tell me about wildlife: around the time of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, two Special Brew-drinking fishermen at Platt Fields Park told me about the "Icelandic geese" with "bright red beaks" that had "come over because of the volcano" - although the only geese there that i could see were the usual Greylags and Canadas...)

I'm not quite sure exactly what species of turtle this one is: presumably it's either a released pet or the descendant of one (while i have heard that it's too cold for turtles to reproduce in Britain, this one's small size did surprise me a bit, as the usual stories about turtles living in UK bodies of water are about pets that people released when they "got too big to keep"), so it would have to be a species commonly imported as a pet: possibly a Trachemys slider? (The Lord Geekington would probably be able to conclusively identify it...)

In any case, it's worth noting that if i hadn't heard the rumour about it, and therefore been looking for turtles, i almost certainly would have dismissed this turtle at a glance as just a roundish lump or stump on a log, and not have realised that any such thing lives in Alexandra Park - so all kinds of things can lurk right under people's noses, completely unnoticed...