NAME THAT COOTER!
That's not nearly as dirty as you might be thinking. Cooters are a group of water turtles in the genus Pseudemys. The Delaware Valley's redbellies are a cooter (P. rubriventris), for example. This one was basking in a large ditch along a dirt road in the Croatan National Forest in eastern North Carolina, near a large lake and a whole lot of the shrubby wetland they call 'pocosin.'
Three species of cooter occur in this section of NC. They've got river cooters, but this this was no river. They've got redbellies, which do live in slower water (think of all those ponds/bogs in the Pine Barrens), but it looks too yellow and, to my eye, a little too flat in profile. That leaves the Florida cooter (P. floridana), a slower-water species with a yellow belly.
Let me know what you think.
