How to Find a Lost Turtle (A Guaranteed Method)

Finding a lost turtle can be very challenging, but not impossible. It’s important to know where to look, how to make your turtle come to you, how to properly expand your search area, and to understand why it got lost in the first palace. So let’s start with the beginning.

When searching for a lost turtle you should start by looking in the area you last saw it, as turtles don’t move too fast. Turtles usually look for quiet, dark, and concealed places where they can hide. Indoors you should check out under the furniture and the corners of the room. Outside near piles of rocks and leaves.

This is the short version. There are a lot more things that you can do when you search for your turtle. And we are going to look at each possible thing that you can do to find your turtle.

Places You Should Search

As I said turtles are usually not that fast, so they couldn’t have gone too far. Especially since they are also very cautious and don’t rush through places they don’t know.

So the first thing you should do is to search the nearby area. As there is a very good chance that your turtle is still nearby.

If your turtle is not in the middle of the room, or in the backyard, then it’s most likely hiding somewhere close by.

If you lost your turtle indoors you should start by checking under the furniture, bed, couch, wardrobe, etc. And also make sure to check behind the furniture, especially in the corners of the room.

Another place where your turtle might be is digging in a flowerpot. A common reason why turtles run away from their tank is to lay eggs and indoors the only suitable place to do so is a flowerpot. Female turtles after a certain age need to lay eggs every year, even if there is no male around.

If you lost your turtle outdoors you should start by checking all the possible hiding spots, piles of rocks, piles of leaves, holes in the ground, and the pool, if you have one.

If you have a vegetable garden it’s also worth checking as your turtle might have just gone for a snack.

Depending on the type of fence that you have, there is a good chance that your turtle can’t get over and under it. The only way a turtle can possibly go through a fence is if it can get through it.

If you’ve searched everywhere but you still couldn’t find your turtle, it’s time to change the strategy and make your turtle come to you.

Make You Turtle Come To You

There is one thing that turtles want more than anything else. And that is food. More precisely meat and fish.

So, to make your turtle come to you grab a big piece of meat or a fish and cut it into small pieces. From what I’ve noticed turtles like meat, chicken, pork, and beef, just as much as they like fish. But if you have fresh fish at your disposal, I would recommend you to use fish, since it’s smellier and will attract your turtle faster.

Place the pieces of meat and fish through the area where you lost your turtle, get back a few feet, and make sure that the area is quiet as possible. You don’t want your turtle to believe tha there is danger nearby. If they do they won’t come out of hiding to eat.

After a while, if your turtle is still in the area it will come out and eat the meat. If this doesn’t happen after a few hours then you need to change your approach.

Expand the Search

If you can’t find your turtle in or near your home, it means that our turtle has decided to go out and explore. Where exactly it’s hard to know. So, at this point, you have to expand your search area as much as possible. But doing so on your own has its limits, so if you want to find your turtle it’s time to get help from other people.

First, make sure that you have a picture of your turtle. Since most people have a smartphone these days, you don’t need to print it. But if you can do so, make sure to have a few copies of the picture. A printed picture is easier to remember than one on a phone.

The first people you should talk to are your neighbors, since most turtles don’t travel too fast, there is a good chance that one of them might have seen your turtle.

After that is time to get your phone out and talk to local animal shelters and vets. If somebody finds your turtle and doesn’t know who it belongs to. This is where they will take it.

And if there are any online local groups you should also let them know.

Other Places to Search

There are a few more places where you can search. Those are the places where a turtle can live. But my advice is not to focus on them right from the start, since your turtle doesn’t know how to reach them. There is a good chance that your turtle will stay in one of those places if manages to find them. But unless they are next to your house, it will take your turtle a while to get here.

Those places are ponds, lakes, and rivers. In other words the natural habitat of a turtle. 

But again, you have a better chance of finding your turtle by, informing other people, and actively searching, instead of waiting by a pond for your turtle to get there.

In order to get a better idea of where your turtle is, you should take a look at why it got lost in the first place.

Why Your Turtle Got Lost

Pregnancy

As I mentioned at the start of the article, female turtles start to lay eggs every year, once they’ve reached maturity, even if there is no male turtle nearby.

The male turtle only fertilizes the eggs, so that babies can come out of them. But it has nothing to do with the eggs themselves.

Turtles usually lay their eggs in piles of leaves or holes that they dig, but never in water. So the tank is definitely not a suitable environment for this. So when the time comes for them to lay eggs they will do their best to get out of the tank and find a good place to lay the eggs.

The first thing you have to do if you want to know if your turtle is really pregnant is to find out if it’s a male or a female, so you should read this article that is going to tell you if that’s the case: How to Tell If Your Turtle Is Male or Female (with Pictures).

And if your turtle is a female, and you want to know if she is pregnant, then you should read this article where you will find all the info you need: How to Tell if Your Turtle Is Pregnant.

If your turtle is a female, and it was pregnant, then you should look for a place where it could have laid its eggs. After turtles lay their eggs they are exhausted, and you should find it nearby.

Scared

If you just got your turtle, then it’s absolutely normal for it to try and escape its tank. 

Turtles can get scared very easily, and moving from one place to another can be very frightening for them. They will go from a small cramped tank, that they share with multiple turtles, to a new spacious tank where they can live alone. And if they were sent through the mail, they will be even more scared.

A turtle can be very easily scared by a lot of things that we don’t see as scary, for example, loud music and loud sounds in general, and bird sounds. Cats and dogs can also scare turtles a lot.

If your turtle was scared by something constantly, then it probably tried to run away from it.

Hungry

If your turtle was hungry, then it probably ran away in search of food. If this is the case you should search for it in places where it can find food.

Here is an extract from my article: How Much and How Often Should I Feed My Turtle? +Schedule. Which should give you an idea if you were feeding your turtle enough food.

Turtles are omnivorous, which means tha they will eat fruits, vegetables, and meat. The only things that they can’t eat are processed foods like pasta, bread, salami, sausages, etc. The only exception, are pellets, which should actually make up a good part of what they eat.

A balanced diet will be like this:

• 80% pellets
• 10% fruits and vegetables
• 10% meat / dried insects

As you can see pellets will make up most of their diet, while fruits, vegetables, and meat will be like snacks, or treats. While all of them have their benefits pellets contain on average everything that a turtle needs, while vegetables for example, only contain some of the nutrients that a turtle needs.

The simplest way to put this method into practice is to find a small container, like a medicine cup, a shot glass, or a bottle cap. This container has to be approximately the same size as the head of your turtle, without the neck. Then you fill that container to the top, and then you can feed the food inside the container to your turtle.

You don’t always have to use a container, you can always just estimate the food that you would need to fill its head. If you sometimes give your turtle a little too much food, and sometimes you give it a little less, there will be no problem. Your turtle won’t be affected by small differences.

The best way to give your turtle the right amount of food is to use the size of the head method.

This method works great because it takes into consideration the size of the turtle, and gives you a fixed amount of food that you have to give your turtle. And as the turtle grows the amount of food will grow with it.

This is the method I’ve been using to feed my turtles for the last 5 years, and all of them are in great shape.

Between the two methods, I would definitely recommend you the size of the head method, as it’s guaranteed that you won’t overfeed your turtle, and as an added bonus it doesn’t take that much time either.

Now that you know what and how much to feed your turtle, let’s take a look at how often you should be feeding your turtle.

This part is really simple, but it will vary depending on the age of your turtle. If your turtle, adult turtles have a different schedule than juveniles, and juveniles have a different schedule than baby turtles.

Juvenile turtles are turtles that are still growing. And adult turtles are turtles that have reached their maximum size. So if you search on google for the species of your turtle and then type average size you should get an idea if your turtle is an adult or a juvenile. (If your turtle still needs a couple of inches to reach its full size you can consider it an adult.)

Now let’s get back to how often you should feed your turtle.

If your turtle is an adult you should feed it once every 3 days. And this will look like this.

Not Enough Space

Another common reason for a turtle to leave its tank is the lack of space.

Here is an extract from my article How Much Water to Put in a Turtle Tank? (+What Kind of Water), which should give you an idea of how much space a turtle actually needs.

In general, you want the water in the tank to be twice as deep as the shell of your turtle. As for the volume of water, you want to have 10 gallons of water for every inch of shell that your turtle has.

Despite being known for their slowness, turtles are actually very active and fast underwater. And they need some space in order to move around. If they don’t have enough space to move around, their health will slowly start to deteriorate, and they will end up sick. Or they will try to escape from their tank.

Improper Basking Area

Turtles are cold-blooded animals, which means they can’t regulate their own body temperature and have to rely on their environment to do this. In the case of pet turtles, they have to rely on the basing area. Basking areas are also their only source of vitamin D, which helps them process the calcium that they eat.

Overall basking areas are extremely important for turtles, and in case they lack one, r don’t have a proper one they will leave their tank in search of a sunny and warm place.

The basking area is made out of 3 parts, a platform on which the turtle can sit, and two light bulbs, which are responsible for the heat and UVB rays.

This can be quite a long subject so I won’t expand on it here, but if you want to know more you can check out my article: Best Turtle Light Bulb (Illustrated Buyers Guide), where you will find detailed instructions on how to position the bulbs, at what distance to place them, and how to choose the best bulb for your setup.

Final Thoughts

Finding a lost turtle is not always easy, but it can be done.

Start by searching the area where you’ve last seen, and slowly expand your search area while checking every possible hiding place.

If you are sure that your turtle is still in the area but you can’t find it, try to make it come out with some food. Turtles really like meat and fish, so use those as bait.

If you still haven’t found your turtle, then you should add more people to your search, so start contacting your neighbors, and local online groups, as well as animal shelters and vets. At some point, somebody will see your turtle.

Best of luck finding your turtle!

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