Book by Sy Montgomery, illustrated by Matthew Patterson
HarperCollins
Now out in paperback
Review by Curtis Abraham
Matt Patterson and Sy Montgomery befriend Red-necked Pond turtles at the Turtle Survival Center, Cross, South Carolina. Courtesy photo
As a kid, during summer holidays in Queens, New York, my father would take me on a week-long visit to my godmother’s house. Apart from her delicious homemade roti wrapped with aromatic curry chicken, chickpeas, and Irish potatoes, I remember well the small green turtle toy that when plugged into the wall socket, served as our night light in the small but cozy room with three tiny beds where my godmother’s three kids and I slept in. The turtle’s emerald green light offered us protection from what we imagined was hiding under our beds or lurking in the shadows outside our window.
Decades on, just the memory of this green turtle light plugged into a wall socket has often been a source of comfort in challenging times, like Charles Foster Kane's remembrances of Rosebud, the sled he played on as a child, at the end of the movie Citizen. But during those summer holidays, we watched on television the Japanese Kaiju (monster) movies of two generations ago featuring, among other beasts Gammera, the giant fire-breathing flying turtle monster. If our turtle night light gave us kids comfort, then Gammera was an entirely different matter!
Sy Montgomery’s books rarely disappoint. “Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World shell by Shattered Shell”, happily follows that pattern of success.
Montgomery introduces us to her pal, the award-winning natural history artist Matt Patterson, who shares her love for turtles, and then some. Patterson, who has also illustrated books on freshwater fish, is a self-proclaimed “turtle nerd” who cares for four pet turtles (Polly has been with him for a quarter century!). Often seen in his trademark flip flops and headbands, he’s an affable outdoorsman who enjoys kayaking, and would go to any lengths to paint a turtle or indeed to help one in distress. Patterson has a Renaissance master’s-like dedication to detail and because of this his amazing wildlife illustrations are more like photographs than anything else, and yet they somehow transcend photography.
The book is set to the backdrop of the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic (“how worse could this new pathogen be?” Montgomery, a dengue fever survivor, thought to herself), the George Floyd tragedy, anti-racism protests, and Donald Trump’s unforgettable first presidency.
At the heart of the book’s narrative are the tours Montgomery and Patterson take of prominent turtle rescue organizations in the US such as the Turtle Survival Alliance’s (TSA) Turtle Survival Center at Cross, South Carolina, just outside the city of Charleston. Here they witnessed the day-to-day functions of the organization, and are introduced to a variety of turtle clients and their human caretakers.
“This is one of the largest and most important breeding colonies for the world’s most critically endangered turtles,” Montgomery writes.
TSA’s origins can be traced back to a series of high-profile confiscations of illegally trafficked turtles involving thousands of critically endangered turtles in the Philippines and Madagascar. TSA came to the aid of these trafficked reptiles, many of whom were dehydrated and hungry, many others with smashed shells and injured eyes, by providing food, shelter, and veterinary assistance.
Montgomery gives us detailed and heartfelt portraits of some of the dedicated individuals who are turtle caretakers, like TSA’s Director of Animal Management, Cris Hagen, a former juvenile delinquent and tattoo enthusiast turned turtle conservationist extraordinaire in adulthood, going about their daily business of looking after rare and endangered species of turtles one turtle at a time.
At the Turtle Rescue League (TRL), another prominent turtle care and conservation organization located in Southbridge, Massachusetts on the east coast of the US, Patterson and Montgomery embark on a stint as volunteers, and it's where they were exposed to some of the most horrific injuries and near-death experiences of the turtle patients in residences (part of their duties also included the grim task of extracting frozen turtle cadavers from TRL’s mortuary freezer and preparing them for a mass burial).
But TRL is also a place of hope and joy. Montgomery writes lovingly about the veterinary care and physical rehabilitation given to these ailing and abandoned reptiles, like being in an expensive Swiss sanitarium for turtles. There are also inspiring stories of turtle patients whose bodies have been devastated by vehicle accidents or plain human cruelty but who have managed to pull through and thrive.
A significant part of the joy at TRL, the reader will sense, was Patterson and Montgomery’s participation in fieldwork in New England, on the northeast coast of the US, by collecting newly hatched turtle eggs during the height of the egg-laying season, and releasing turtle hatchlings into the wild insuring that the next generation has a fighting chance.
The book also describes some of the general public’s interactions with turtles and the ordinary men, women, and young people who have taken up humble conservation measures of their own to protect these ancient reptiles.
In deft strokes, she describes the turtle caregivers, Alexxia Bell, Turtle Rescue League’s president, and her colleague and co-founder Natasha Nowick (who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, but, remarkably, manages to construct turtle habitats among other activities) and tells us the story of how they met, their mutual love for turtles, and the establishing of the Turtle Rescue League from scratch. They are also joined by a handful of dedicated and industrious volunteers like Mike Henry, a software developer, and employee/volunteer Michaela Conder.
The pair is forever haunted (and bonded) by a crushed turtle they found while on a hiking date. So bad were its injuries that they had to put the poor creature out of its misery quickly by running it over, head first, with their car.
Soon, what can only be described as turtle-mania took over their lives, and they found themselves living with seventy-five rescued turtles that were housed in six thirty-gallon (113 liters) stock tanks squeezed into an 860-square-foot (about 80 square meters), two-bedroom flat in the town of Webster, Massachusetts, about 57 miles (92 kilometers) west of Boston.
Alexxia and Natasha eventually learned how to do basic repair of turtle shells and consulted with experts, everyone from the head veterinarian of the New England Aquarium to an MS sufferer and cancer survivor at the New York Center for Turtle Rehabilitation, Kathy Mitchell, who had treated thousands of turtles as a wildlife rehabilitator.
The book also tells the stories of some of TRL’s most charismatic and memorable patients. Readers are introduced to Fire Chief (the name comes from the fact that his pond was not far from the local fire department and all the firefighters were his friends), a giant snapping turtle with a once powerful physique and an earthy reddish-brown shell, but who was sadly run over by a truck and ended up in the care of the TRL with a crushed vertebra and spinal column among other injuries. So extensive was this elderly reptile’s injuries that his physical rehabilitation is a significant part of the book’s narrative.
Then there’s Pizza man, a very friendly and easy-going twenty-year-old, twelve-pound red-footed tortoise who was once a drug dealer’s pet, and Sprockets, an incredibly scaly, thirty-pound, twelve year-old Burmese mountain tortoise who was dumped by his owner one autumn day and somehow made his way to the TRL.
Both turtles became the personal pets of the TRL founders. But it wasn’t their plan to have turtle pets. The possibility of adoption to a loving home or the animal being released back into the wild once an injury has healed made the pair to keep their emotions in check towards the turtles.
(the book also explores the emotional toll that such unselfish dedication has on wildlife care-givers and what outside activities they engage in to deal with the angst, especially during the Spring nesting season in north-eastern US).
Turtles evolved around 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period of earth’s history, but what they evolved from is still being debated by scientists. According to London’s Natural History Museum website, some experts argue that turtles are more closely related to lizards and snakes, while others are adamant that they should be placed within the archosaurs, whose members include crocodiles, birds, pterosaurs and dinosaurs.
Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts.
There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins (several species of small turtles living in fresh or brackish water). They are found on most continents, some islands and in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean.
Their shells are made mostly of bone; the upper part is the domed carapace, while the underside is the flatter plastron or belly-plate. Its outer surface is covered in scales made of keratin, the material of hair, horns, and claws. The carapace bones develop from ribs that grow sideways and develop into broad flat plates that join up to cover the body.
Turtles are ectotherms or “cold-blooded”, meaning that their internal temperature varies with their direct environment. They are generally opportunistic omnivores and mainly feed on plants and animals with limited movements.
These reptiles live slowly (the heart of a red-eared slider can slow to one beat per minute), and they die slowly (in lab experiments, when completely deprived of oxygen. The brains of sliders can continue functioning for days at a time). Turtles can also regenerate nerve tissue, even sometimes if the spinal cord is severed in half.
These animals are incredibly hardy. Here’s how Alexxia Bell described to Sy Montgomery and an assembled audience the physical condition of one of their patients, a female snapping turtle:
“The entire first third of her shell was shattered, three of her legs were smashed, one eye was gone; she had been lying on the side of the asphalt road where she’d been hit, cooking in the sun, for hours. But two years later, she was returned to the wild, healed.”
The author sums up the situation of these ancient reptiles in modern times brilliantly when she describes them as: “varied, surprising, and imperiled”.
(one significant difference between tortoises and turtles is that tortoises spend most of their time on land and turtles are adapted for life spent in water, and because of this, their shell morphology is slightly different. Turtle shells are more streamlined and thinner, which helps aquatic behavior like swimming, while tortoises have more rounded and domed shells).
We learn from the book that there are turtle shells that glow in the dark and turtles that can change color annually, like leaves on a tree in the autumn. Others, meanwhile, can breathe through their butts while some pee through their mouths. Some stay active under ice-covered waters while others climb fences and trees.
Turtles, like some other wild species, says Montgomery, have been ignored, shunned, and even ostracized for their small brains and therefore supposed lack of intelligence according to our mammalian minds (it was common belief that domesticated animals were on the lower rungs of the ladder of animal intelligence, but recent research has demonstrated that this is not so). But turtles make a variety of noises: they croak, squeak, belch, whine, and whistle which must surely be a kind of turtle communication.
“Some species of Australian and South American river turtle nestlings communicate vocally with each other, and with their mothers, while still inside the egg.”
The importance of turtles as habitat (ecological) engineers is perhaps best summed up in a letter Matt Patterson wrote to his mom:
Some turtles, like snapping turtles, are the vultures of the ponds, lakes, and rivers, eating dead and decaying animals and plants. Gopher tortoises are considered a keystone species,” he continued, noting that over 360 other species depend on this one kind of turtle, and their burrows, to survive. Other turtle species are equally essential to their ecosystems: Hawksbill sea turtles protect coral reefs by eating sponges, and other sea turtles eat jellyfish, which keeps them from overpopulating
The most remarkable and intriguing characteristic of turtles, of course, are their longevity and the sense of time. In recent years, one turtle has lived to a ripe old age of 288, forty five years older than the official founding of the United States of America, if we were to use the date of 1776-the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Why do turtles live so long?
According to scientists, there is an evolutionary cause and a biological cause. In evolutionary terms, turtle eggs are highly vulnerable to all types of critters, from snakes to skunks to raccoons to coyotes. In order to pass on their genes, turtles have to live long, copulate frequently, and lay lots of eggs.
The biological aspect of turtle longevity is complex and, according to experts such as physiologist Lori Neuman-Lee, one clue to solving the mystery has to do with their genetic make-up and structures called telomeres. These components are made of noncoding strands of DNA, genetic instructions for the organism, that cap the ends of chromosomes, the thread-like structures in a living cell that carries genetic information in the form of genes. Telomeres help protect chromosomes as cells divide. The fact that telomeres in a turtle’s genome experience a lower rate of shortening and degrading means that they're more resistant to certain kinds of damage that can arise from DNA-replication errors (errors in DNA replication can lead to nasty outcomes such as tumors and cell death).
Montgomery provides us with her meditations and insights on time relative to the inherent longevity of turtles and aging in humans. Time is also featured in her reflections of the Covid-19 pandemic and how time appears to stand still, one day blending into the other for months on end (in East Africa, I have experienced another type of time phenomenon whereby its speed appears to depend on whether or not it’s the dry season, or rainy season).
Montgomery also injects much of her personal background into the story; from providing us with reflections on time and aging from our mutual friend, the NYT best-selling author, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, now in her nineties, to describing the ancient Jewish custom of placing pebbles or stones on someone’s grave as was done at the mass burial of TRL patients who didn’t make it (place stones or peebles on graves was also a custom of some early pastoralists communities in the Horn of Africa).
Sy Montgomery with Matt Patterson and Fire Chief, a 42-pound wild snapping turtle the pair cared for at Turtle Rescue League. Courtesy photo
Turtles are a highly prized commodity in the illegal international trade in wildlife, amazingly even if they’re ailing or have suffered some grave bodily injury (“A single Yunnan box could command $200,000 on the black market” while a Chinese three-striped box turtle (“can fetch up to $25,000”). They’ve been hunted for their meat, for use in traditional medicine, and for their shells, which are made into items such as bracelets and eyeglass frames. Such is the crisis that turtles are being pilfered from US seas, ponds and woodlands for the illicit wildlife trade. Sea turtles are often killed accidentally as by-catch in fishing nets. Turtle habitats around the world are being destroyed. As a result of these pressures, many species are extinct or threatened with extinction.
These reptiles also suffer from habitat destruction, harvesting for consumption, the international pet trade, light pollution, urbanization, pollution, climate change and invasive species. “And on top of all this, there is a murderous, monstrous illegal trade in turtles—for their meat, for their eggs, for their shells, and for pets”, says Montgomery.
Turtles are second only to primates in the percentage of threatened species. According to the 2018 publication GLOBAL CONSERVATION STATUS OF TURTLES AND TORTOISES (Order Testudines), of the 360 modern species that have existed since the 16th century, of these, 51%-56% are considered threatened, and 60% considered threatened or extinct.
Irresponsible pet owners who, for one reason or another, dump their turtles into the wild have also created environmental problems. Some released turtles are thought of as invasive species as they displace turtles native to a particular area.
All is far from doom and gloom in the world of turtle conservation. There are some successes, and TSA has been at the heart of one particular triumph. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were only a few Burmese star tortoises left in the wild, so few that they were basically considered extinct. In 2015, however, working together with the Myanmar Ministry of Natural Resources and the Wildlife Conservation Society, captive breeding efforts by the TSA of 175 confiscated Burmese star turtles yielded some 15,000 baby Burmese Star turtles. Approximately 2,100 were released into the wild and continue to breed there.
Today’s climate emergency has of course affected the very survival of many of the world’s turtle populations. Higher or lower temperatures, for example, are known to affect the sex of certain reptiles. “Just a few degrees’ difference in heat determines whether eggs hatch into males or females”, writes Montgomery, but if temperatures are too high, it can ruin any possibility of producing any hatchlings.
But it’s not only potential hatchlings that are at risk. Nesting mama turtles are also beset by a number of dangers. Vehicles on busy roads are a major threat, but so too are dogs and cats chew them up, lawn mowers and farm equipment can inflict significant damage, while curious and playful children harass and steal them.
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