Because it’s awesome.

This one was crossing the lawn this past week, headed back to the trees and probably a nearby creek. Despite the name, wood turtles still favor being around water, though much more inclined to regularly go walkabout on land than the painted or snapping turtles.

The wood turtle is the rarest of the three turtles that can be expected in the Upper Peninsula. While pockets of the yellow-throated Blanding’s turtle can be found in certain U.P. counties, they’re not as widespread as the wood, said Jim Harding, an adjunct wildlife specialist at the Michigan State University Museum who spent much of his life studying the wood turtle. But the wood struggles more than the Blanding’s in the Lower Peninsula, though both turtles are “species of special concern” in Michigan.

The wood usually sticks by rivers and streams — “they’re an animal of moving water” — rather than the pools preferred by the painteds. Yet females “tend to go terrestrial for the first part of summer, while males often hang near the water hoping a female will come down” to mate along the shoreline, Harding said.

Betsy Bloom/Daily News photos

He was unable to tell the sex of this one from photos. The behavior — quite a distance from the creek, quite close to our sand and gravel driveway that each year sees a steady march of turtles to lay eggs — suggests it was a female.

Counting the growth rings on the back shell, Harding judged this turtle to be at least 25 years old — which means it predates the house being on the property. While it could be older, he said the very distinct ridges and general lack of wear on the shell probably means it’s close to what’s indicated by the rings.

Though in the same family as the more aquatic painted turtles, wood turtles have a number of different characteristics. The shell is more domed, though not as much as the box turtle, with a central keel and individual plates that look vaguely like pyramids or barnacles. The legs have more prominent scales and the head more prominent eyes. The wood seems more like a “tortoise” in appearance, though that name in the U.S. is reserved for one family of fully terrestrial turtles, Harding said.

Another major difference between the wood turtle and its painted cousins is wood turtles hatch more quickly, sometimes by mid-July, and never overwinter underground in the nest, Harding said. Yet they mature more slowly than the painteds, not reaching breeding age until about 14 to 16 years old, he said, compared with 9 to 10 years for painteds.

The wood turtle makes up for that in longevity: Harding, who has studied the species since 1969, has data on wood turtles 75 to 80 years old and actually has one at his Lansing area home that’s probably about 60.

But wood turtles in the wild face a number of challenges to reaching an advanced age. Harding thinks the main threat today has been the rise of the raccoon. When he first began coming to the Upper Peninsula as a child, local residents would tell him raccoons were rare in the 1940s and 1950s.

During his early years of research, he’d see raccoons plunder some turtle nests, but most would go undetected. Then interest waned in raccoon pelts, hunting relaxed and raccoons followed humans in spreading out, Harding said.

By the late 1990s, some turtle nesting areas had no eggs survive to hatch. Worse, the raccoons are efficient predators on the turtles, gnawing on legs or tail until the turtle bleeds out. He’s seen a number of wood turtles missing limbs or tails.

Though retired, Harding recently visited an old wood turtle study site, where he and other colleagues managed to recapture five older juvenile wood turtles that had been incubated years ago for a “head start” and then released in the wild. Though encouraged that they’d survived, the lack of younger turtles indicated “natural reproduction and recruitment is still very low in the area.”

Poaching for the pet trade, especially overseas, continues to stunt the wood turtle population as well, Harding said, which is why he usually won’t reveal exactly where he finds them.

He did have some good news for the species — despite some fears about the effects of human disturbance, Harding believes wood turtles can co-exist with logging and some development in their environment. Clear-cuts, for example, will open up nesting sites or develop foliage they prefer to feed on, he said.

If the human neighbors take some care to watch for wood turtles, “they’re very compatible with people, as long as we don’t run them over with cars,” he said.

“Wood turtles are not a species of the wilderness,” he said. “As long as the turtles themselves are left alone — and the area is not totally paved over — they’re fine.”

Betsy Bloom can be reached at 906-774-2772, ext. 240, or bbloom@ironmountaindailynews.com.