Working as a ranger necessarily entails the protection of the park's resources - some of which may be covered in swamp grime, armed with steel-trap jaws and wanting absolutely nothing to do with your well-intentioned heroics. On the 26th of May, I was riding along in a patrol vehicle with my supervisor, Ranger Ryan Levins, when we spotted one such angry resource apparently sunning itself in the middle of the road - which is no place for a slow-moving snapping turtle to be.
"Where are you going, buddy?"
This is actually our second encounter with reptiles lying in the middle of park roads (the first being a very large black snake), and It's my understanding that the local fox cubs and various other creatures at Gettysburg have the same bad habit of wanting to sleep on the still-warm asphalt during the night. This usually doesn't end well for the animals, so the turtle was lucky that we happened to come along. He yet shall live to be ill-tempered and scary for another day.
The ProRanger Philadelphia program is an academic, technical skills training, and internship program that is cooperatively administered by the National Park Service and Temple University. The program was established to recruit and train law enforcement park rangers for the National Park Service. Students take coursework during the academic year at Temple University and participate in internships at National Park Service sites during the summer. Follow their experiences here.
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