Watch Adorable Baby Turtles Learn to Catch Crickets

Baby turtles come out of their shells ready to face the world. Because mother turtles don’t stick around to watch their eggs hatch, little ones have to fend for themselves from the get-go. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need a little practice.

As part of a piece on threatened pond turtles, the PBS video series Deep Look captured a group of enterprising young turtles trying out their hunting skills on crickets. And those skills, well, they’re not always so formidable. You can almost feel the disappointment as the baby turtles amble up to their prey, only to have it hop away as they open their mouths.

This particular group of turtles are being raised in captivity and released into the wilds of San Francisco’s Presidio, in order to bolster the population of native turtles in one of the city’s few natural lakes. They’ll have the hunting thing down by then, surely.

Banner image screenshot via YouTube