I went for a walk with my friend Jean yesterday and we saved a baby turtle. Well, Jean did, mostly; she spotted it a few inches into the semi-rural road we were walking on, pointed toward trying to cross, perhaps having made its way out of the ditch alongside the pavement.
It looked like an Eastern painted turtle, its top shell maybe an inch and a half long at most. We were afraid it might be dead but when I touched it it moved its front legs. So I picked it up,* held it delicately with my fingertips along the edge of its shell, and while Jean searched along the road and ditch to see if other hatchlings were on the march I carried it across the road and down a lawn to a nearby pond.
The little guy totally sucked itself into its shell, of course, while I grasped it. When I put it down a couple of feet from the water’s edge and stepped back, it cautiously poked its head and forelegs out a bit. I left it there.
Will it survive? I hope so, but it’s a tough world out there for baby turtles. Still, it at least won’t be squashed by a passing car, and it’s in its ideal habitat now. Jean didn’t find any fellow hatchlings to rescue, so we went on our way homeward.
* Yes, I did wash my hands to get the salmonella off as soon as I got home.
I found baby bunnies this weekend while I was mowing the yard… including a dead one that I thought maybe I had run over. But then I decided that if I had run over it with the mower, there would have been fur and blood everywhere, and there wasn’t – it was still in one piece. I went out later to check on the remaining bunnies and they were gone, so hopefully mama bunny came and got them and moved them off to a safe spot.
Last turtle rescue was a few years ago, I was with a group of friends in the Galapagos and walking along a beach where there were a number of ‘digs’ where mama sea turtle had laid here eggs. Most were deserted, but we found one baby-come-lately working towards the beach. Since birds consider them a delicacy, we sorta surrounded the young turtle and escorted him to the surf line, where he/she promptly disappeared…
…and was probably eaten by a dolphin 10 minutes later, but hey, we tried.
As we walked on home, Jean told me about another baby turtle rescue at the barn where she used to board her horse. They had a pile of wood chips out back they used for various purposes, and the local snapping turtles apparently decided that would be a great place to lay their eggs. She thought there wound up being signs of about five nests in all.
In hatching season there began to be much heaving and migration of the wood chips, and one day there appeared a mighty swarm of baby snapping turtles spread out across the outdoor arena. Jean and others grabbed buckets, pitchforks (you don’t want to pick up even tiny baby snappers!), scooped up every turtlet they could find, about 50 of them, and transported them down to the nearby stream.
Where no doubt some of them succumbed to predatory birds or fish or adults of their species, but at least they got a good start on their reptilian life.
I rescue turtles fairly often. Not uncommon to come across them basking on the center line of the highway. I take them to a creek near my house that offers them the most remote from civilization home in this rapidly developing area. Much of it flows through protected land so they have a good chance of living their turtle-y lives unmolested. I live on a small lake but it seems over populated turtle wise. There’s a lady that feeds them and says she gets crowds. I can’t remember what she said she feeds them. Commercial fish food, like for fish farms, I think.
