New Yorker Maine’s ‘king of snappers’

Despite his 6 feet 5 inches and trademark pith helmet, and despite the pickup truck loaded with 3,000 pounds of squirming turtles, John Rogers is an elusive individual.

The man dubbed “king of the snappers” by his biographers spends most of his life canoeing remote rivers and ponds with a burlap bag full of live snapping turtles by his feet.

Rogers, who has a camp in Willimantic and a permit to trap turtles in Maine, probably knows these waters better than any biologist.

The New York resident didn’t respond to requests for an interview, but his reputation is already well publicized.

Estimates of Rogers’ catch range between 80,000 and 120,000 snappers, taken over a lifetime of trapping in thousands of waters scattered from New Jersey to Maine.

He has become world-famous for his technique of catching snapping turtles with his bare hands. His legend stems from the fact that he uses a top-secret homemade turtle call to attract the snappers, then hauls them into his boat by the leg or the tail. He’s not afraid of the turtles’ snap and he has the scars to prove it.

It was Rogers who caught the world-record 76.5-pound turtle in Massachusetts and named it after a defensive lineman because of its 19-inch-thick neck, according to a story in Field and Stream magazine.

Rogers also claims that in 1969 he trapped 3,000 pounds of turtles in a pond near Woodstock, N.Y., where free spirits had skinny-dipped just weeks earlier at the famous counterculture rock festival held nearby, according to a National Geographic story.

In a book by natural history writer Richard Conniff published in 1998, Rogers said that snapping turtle populations are grossly underestimated.

“The snapping turtles right now are in the biggest population explosion of their history,” he told Conniff, after the writer spent a year tracking the trapper and finally found him in a backwoods cabin in Maine.

Rogers went on to say that he sells about 25 tons of turtle meat in the United States each year without harming the population. In National Geographic, he told the story of one Connecticut pond where he has taken more than 37,000 pounds of turtles over the past 20 years.

Today, turtles are thriving because they can adapt to a wide variety of habitats, and have colonized thousands of man-made ponds, he told Conniff. Rogers alone has stocked more than a quarter-million baby snappers in his trapping waters to ensure the future of the resource.

“I know where the turtles are, what they’re doing, and when they’re doing it,” Rogers told Conniff.

“Turtles are my people,” the king of the snappers said.

Conniff’s book, “Every Creeping Thing: True Tales of Faintly Repulsive Wildlife,” was published by Henry Holt and Co. in 1998.

Misty Edgecomb is the outdoor reporter for the Bangor Daily News. She can be reached at medge

comb@bangordailynews.net.