The best way to care for Wood Turtles is to understand their basic biology.  When I was but 15 years old, I read a paper that described every aspect of what it means to be a wood turtle. The paper was entitled:

"The Wood Turtle, Clemmys insculpta...A Natural History."

The various sections of this paper include but are certainly not limited to age, growth, habitat, hibernation, mating, nesting, food, captive breeding, and incubation. This 18-page article was published in 1979 and has become rather difficult to obtain for most people.  

WoodTurtle.com is very proud to have obtained the exclusive rights to post such a seminal reference, making it available to Wood Turtle lovers worldwide.  Interested parties can obtain an Adobe .pdf reproduction of the original paper by clicking on the "Documents" link on the navigation bar at the top of this webpage.  Permission to reproduce and post the electronic version of this paper was obtained from the authors, Jim Harding and Tom Bloomer, as well as the New York Herpetological Society.

Please note that this is a rather large 5 MB .pdf file, so the download time can be rather long unless you have a high-speed internet connection.  Please be patient, as it is well worth the wait!  You must also have the free Abobe Acrobat Reader software already installed on your computer.  If you do not have this Adobe software, simply click the Adobe link below to download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Learning about properly caring for North American Wood Turtles can seem like an over-whelming task and experience at first.  One of the best ways, however, is learning from the experiences / mistakes / successes of others.  With this in mind, I recommend strongly that Wood Turtle owners join TurtleForum.com. Click on the banner below to be taken directly to the forum.

        


There are many sections to this VERY popular on-line forum.  One section entitled "Boggy Creek" deals with semi-terrestrial turtle species. This includes Wood, Spotted, Blanding's, Pond, and Bog turtles.  Turtle Forum has over 3,000 registered members and 600,000 archived posts!  What sets this Forum apart from others on the Web is the knowledgeable and extremely friendly staff.

Finally, there are a number of informative webpages on the internet, so I would encourage you to peruse the WoodTurtle.com "Links" webpage by clicking the button at the top right of this page.