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.

Release Day for the Bats

Don't you want me back in your bedroom? How about your attic? I don't poop that much.

I’d already made contact with the owners of the house where Stella was captured, asking them if there were a quiet nook on a porch where I might tape up the bats’ roosting towel, with the girls bundled inside, for the afternoon. As fate would have it, the stately old house was under renovation, every square inch of it being scraped and prepped for painting. It was a forest of ladders and scaffolds and exactly the wrong place to hang up a couple of sensitive bats. It is ever thus with bats, and chimney swifts, too...the places where they can live are always being screened or boarded up, or in this case, scraped and painted. Uh-oh. 

 I thought hard. Bill’s mom lived only two blocks away, and her house looks out on Camp Tupper, a beautiful Revolutionary War encampment that’s now a tree-studded park. 

The mound you see is an ancient Hopewell burial mound made in the shape of a turtle. The turtle's head is facing you with a willow oak planted about where its beak would be. Its legs splay out to the sides. Bill and I had our first kiss on the head of that turtle. There's something nice about that. The park is also great bat foraging habitat. 

On the wall of her board-fenced back courtyard is a wooden cabinet that houses a garden hose—the perfect sheltered spot to hang a couple of bats for the day.

 I taped up the folded towel inside the cabinet, put food and water beneath just as I did at home, then peeled it back for one last look at the girls. Their eyes glittered in the bright light and they huddled smaller as bats will when they’re suddenly exposed. I stroked their backs gently with a bare finger. The last couple of days, I’d allowed myself to feel their fur without a glove. I ran my finger over the surprisingly cool, translucent membranes of their tails. As daytime bats will, they stayed perfectly still.  Good bye, sweet bats. Good luck, Godspeed.

I propped the cabinet door open so it couldn’t blow shut, giving them easy egress from their hiding place, and placed a bowl of mealworms and one of water just below the towel where they’d be sure to find it before they launched into the free night air. 

Three months later, I’d done wrong by them and then somehow managed to make it right again. They’d taught me what I’d need to know to truly be of help to other bats going forward. And they would live to fly again, maybe even have their babies.

A check of the cabinet a week later showed that they'd been in such a hurry to get out and wheel among the trees and old houses surrounding Camp Tupper that they didn't even stop to eat. They were probably tired of mealworms, anyway, probably lusting for the feel of mothwing powder on their tongues.

A last look at the cabinet where my girls were waiting for nightfall.

What a joy they'd been. So much more than flying mice; they were more like tiny flying Chihuahuas in their intelligence and sensitivity.

I like insectivores.

You can redefine "soft" just touching their fur. It's so soft you can barely feel it.

From Barb Stewart: My husband John just said, "One phone call to Julie, and the illustrated chapters on natural wonders we could never have know about or even imagined just keep on rolling into our lives."

Barb and John, how Stella enriched my life I can't begin to tell. What some might view as a mere nuisance (a bat circling a bedroom, ack!) was to me a gift beyond price or measure. I loved that bat, fiercely, for the short few months she was given to me to care for. Most of all she was a teacher. Everything she did gave me a glimmer of insight as to how to care for her. The final goal here is to do right by bats that come to me in the future. My instinct tells me that it is not right to keep them at room temperature in the winter; my instinct tells me that it's not right to feed them all winter. What I'm looking for is a protocol that will be the closest imitation of what nature would provide them. And that will probably be quickly integrating foundling bats into an existing winter colony where they can sleep and commune with others as nature intended. I don't know whether I can find an accessible colony, or even whether that will work, but it's got to be better than what I'm doing here.

Thank you, Barb and John, for my impetuous blonde, who is even now probably hanging back in your attic, and flittering over Camp Tupper in the evening. I miss her and Mirabel so!!

May 14, 2012. My to-do list for that day said, "Pack for Alaska.  Pack Liam for Camp Hervida. Liam orthodontist 4:15. Check on chewed turtle at Campus Martius. Release bats. Depart for Columbus PM." Two of these things are not like the others...

Here ends the bat saga.