Benson the Box Turtle Goes Free

When we last left Benson, I was about to pick him up at the Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus, where he'd spent almost a year convalescing and gaining weight...and color! Here he is with a painful bilateral aural abscess (that's what makes his ears pooch out on the sides).

And here he is nine months later! The red has come back to his eyes! The yellow has come back to his scutes!

Ah, Benson, we hardly knew ye. 

Just lemme go. I see the woods and I wanna go.

Benson had a charmingly hitchy gait, lifting his knees high and setting his feet down with a jerk, like a turtle who had, oh, I don't know, maybe lived in a cardboard box for 20 years...

but he could move, and move he did.

I decided not to take him to the place on Dean's Fork where he'd been abandoned last summer, but to release him on our place. You never know what's going to happen to the forests around here. Most likely, as soon as they near maturity, they'll be cut.

Not ours.

I carried Benson out and left him by a tadpole-filled puddle, the meadow to his right, the woods to his left.

He was still thinking when I left.

 Good luck with your next 75 years, Benson. May you never end up in a cardboard box again.

Note tiny black Pied Mountain Boar in the background. The elusive Skunk-Dog of the Ohio woods.

This post is for my DOD, (Dear Old Dad) who would have turned 100 on June 18, 2012. He was 47 when I came along, the last of five. Little did he know when the nurse announced that he was the proud grampa (!) of yet another girl (the family legend says his face fell...I prefer to think it's because she congratulated him as my grampa) that the girl would follow him everywhere he went and soak up all he had to teach like a thirsty tomato plant. Thank you for all you continue to give me, not least of which is a great love for box turtles, and a resolve to live in the country forever after. You are the BEST. And you're still teaching. Your voice is right here in every word.

A Box Turtle, Discarded

It's easy to forget the other little patients in my care when I'm yanging on and on about just the two starlets, Stella and Mirabel. Does anyone remember Benson?

Last August, we were walking Dean's Fork with Tim Ryan and Nina Harfmann and Shila Wilson and Phoebe called, "I found a turtle!"

Phoebe and Tim came back with the report that the turtle was soaking in a creek (never a good sign) and his coloring was off. Another bad sign. Turtles who feel lousy crawl to the nearest water and soak for days or weeks. Pale or "off" coloration indicates malnutrition.  Just look at his eyes--the irides are white. They should be blazing red!

You can see that he started life as a beautiful, highly colored turtle, but something has befallen him.

A closer look revealed that this poor gent was suffering from a bilateral ear infection, something that can strike a turtle who isn't getting what he needs. The ear infection, it turned out, was not his major problem.

Because I am not a veterinarian nor am I a surgeon, I asked Tim Ryan to drop "Benson," as Phoebe named him, off at the Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus on his way back to the airport. Tim was happy to leave several extra hours to make that happen, and he's remained in touch about Benson ever since.

Not long after, I was up there myself, and I spoke to my rehab guru, Lisa Fosco of OWC. 

She showed me several aspects of Benson's overall condition that indicated to her that he was a long-term captive.

It's hard to convey it in a photograph, but the back of Benson's shell shows malformation. It's sunken in on the sides, it drops straight down in back, and is a bit knobby over the pelvis, and it's got a wide outward-trending flange that goes out over his hind legs. That, his emaciated condition, the poor soft part coloration and the bilateral ear infection (very common in malnourished captive boxies) all indicated to Lisa that Benson had been abducted from the wild and kept in substandard conditions years earlier.

"But I found him in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of hundreds of acres of woods!" I said. And then I realized that Dean's Fork is perfectly accessible by car or ATV or foot, and Benson was found just a few yards off the road, soaking in a creek in late August. If you had a longterm captive turtle who just kept getting sicker and all you knew is you wanted to get rid of him, what would you do with him? Dump him by a creek in the middle of several hundred acres of woods and hope for the best, that's what you'd do. 

Poor Benson. He felt horrible. But he snapped at and ate a sowbug that crawled by him, and he cleaned up a mess of earthworms and fruit, and his life was about to get a whole lot better.

Benson got his ear abscesses opened and scraped out and then spent almost a year in the care of one of OWC's expert box turtle rehabilitators. And one fine day I got a call that Benson was ready to go. 

It took me awhile to get up to Columbus, but I picked him up on May 9 when Bill and I went to participate in Columbus Audubon's superfun "Wine and Warblers" event at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center.  Hic. 

He was a different turkle. Just wait 'til you see him.