About three months ago, when there was still some doubt that summer really would turn to fall, I set off for a walk around the neighborhood with my dog Kamala. Because the weather was about as perfect as it gets, I headed for the City Lake waterfall hiking trail.
Half a mile from home, while walking facing traffic just before Eastlake Drive turns onto Bridgeway, Kamala began jerking on her leash. Like all dogs, she’d rather sniff than do anything. (A dog’s sense of smell is thousands of times more powerful than a human’s. I once read that dogs constantly sniff the ground for the same reason people read a newspaper or magazine—it’s filled with interesting information.) There was something on the shoulder of the road that was obviously more fascinating than another dog’s pee or the faint remembrance of a squirrel scampering by or even one last bite of cheeseburger in a discarded McDonald’s wrapper.
It was a turtle, flipped upside down and completely flattened by a car tire.
“Leave it,” I told her. “Poor thing.” But as I pulled Kamala away, the writer inside me kicked in. Could I possibly write yet another newspaper column about a turtle? Or had I worn my dear readers completely out with that subject?
I’ve written about a stranded sea turtle washed up on the beach at St. Simon’s Island. About a box turtle that lived for months in our backyard when I was a child. About the neighbor who once gifted my family with a two-gallon zip-lock bag filled with frozen turtle meat. (We didn’t eat it, though we never told the neighbor so.) About my brother’s little bitty pet turtle named Charlie, swallowed whole by our dog when our mother put Charlie—who was in his bowl, complete with multi-colored gravel and miniature plastic palm tree–outside on the picnic table to sunbathe.
I’ve written a ridiculous number of columns about the mama slider turtles who, in late spring, crawl out of City Lake and make their way up the steep dead-end road in front of my house. They dig muddy nests in my yard, always in the same general location, and lay their eggs. Then they return to the lake. Though I’ve never seen even one baby emerge from any of those nests—and believe me, I’ve looked for them—I’m certain they must have, because City Lake is working alive with sliders.
The aforementioned turtle that lay smushed on the shoulder of the road was as big around as a pork chop platter, but it was hard to tell what species of turtle it was. It was too large to be a box turtle. But if it was some kind of lake turtle, why was it so far—at least half a mile in any direction—from City Lake? I would need to do some research before writing about this. I snapped a quick photo with my cell phone and pulled Kamala away before she could roll in the stinky mess.
Then I forgot all about that dead turtle until I was cleaning out my photos last week.
Maybe I could write a column about turtle brumation or about turtles getting lost on their way to wherever they’re trying to go or about why this particular turtle ended up on its back before being run over. But first I needed to figure out exactly what kind of turtle this dearly departed creature was. Using the iPhone feature that helps search for an AI overview of a photographed subject, I got a shocking answer. The flattened animal wasn’t a turtle at all. “This image displays the remains of a nine-banded armadillo,” Google told me. WOW.
What a shame that I’ve run completely out of room to write anything at all about armadillos. But at least I got a chance to write, once again, about turtles.
(January 17, 2026)