Turtles

Of Time and Turtles by Sy Montgomery (published September, 2023)

Of Time and Turtles is mainly about the work of a turtle rescue center where injured turtles have their broken bones and shells repaired and are nursed back to health. If all goes well, these turtles can be returned to their native habitat. If they can’t recover enough to live wild again, they are given a permanent home at the center or in another safe human-controlled place. And if they don’t make it, they receive a respectful burial. The book is a beautiful portrait of several dedicated turtle rescuers and how they function. However, for my taste, it’s a little too detailed about the medical procedures and about the road accidents and intentional harm that is done to them — though the fact that turtles can heal so many more injuries by regrowing damaged parts when treated well is encouraging.

Of Time and Turtles is also about time itself. Turtles are slow; mythically slow (but slow and steady wins the race, you know.) Scientifically the turtle’s ability to perceive movement is slower than that of humans, and vastly slower than that of some creatures like birds. So time in some sense is different for them than for us.

The events at the turtle rescue center that are described in this work of natural history proceed with intense slowness because they occur during the pandemic in 2020. Four years ago this week, the new and virulent coronavirus was declared a national emergency, and the nation began to close virtually all activities, while hospitals were flooded with desperately sick patients.

During this global crisis, time itself changed for many people, including the author Sy Montgomery and the proprietors and turtle rescuers that she immersed herself with, in order to research this book. She wrote the following about the early days of the pandemic:

“For so many people waiting out the crisis, time has lost its boundaries, and life is drained of meaning. But when we are with the turtles, our experience of time—in fact, our experience of almost everything—is completely different from those of our fellow countrymen. Michaela’s girlfriend, Andi, for instance, feels caught in the pandemic time warp. She had hoped to find some direction taking photography in college, but Zoom classes were lame, and now she doesn’t know what to do with her life. But for Michaela, working with the turtles gives her ‘calm, stability, and a sense of purpose’: ‘I’ve dived into something that’s really meaningful, doing something to help a living creature.’ Thanks to the turtles, we are profoundly immersed in spring’s unfolding, and deeply connected to the progression of the dramas in the turtles’ daily lives.” (Of Time and Turtles, p. 106)

Besides rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing injured turtles into the wild, the team also rescues turtle eggs and makes sure that they incubate, hatch, and find an appropriate home. These dedicated volunteers are educators as well, and they present information to schools and invite groups of children to visit the center. The educational activities (obviously) were also on hold during the pandemic, another way the workers were isolated and deprived of a sense of time.

Natural history books can be a delight if they succeed in portraying non-human creatures in an appealing way. Turtles, it turns out, have rather distinct personalities, and despite the many different-from-human features in their brains, in their sense of smell and taste, and in their thought processes, they can relate in many ways to the humans who care for them. Before reading, I was unaware that twenty-five different species of turtles inhabit the US, and I knew nothing of the numerous differences among the species. I didn’t know that sea turtles are often caught by rapid onset of winter weather and then freeze to death on the beaches of Cape Cod — but brave rescuers can save some of them. I didn’t know that turtles love to eat bananas. I didn’t know lots of things…

The potential of the turtle personality — and the intense commitment of the turtle rescuers — makes this book fun to read. I liked the unusual perspective on these normally ignored reptiles, and I loved the quirky names that the rescuers gave them, and how attached they were. Above all, the author causes the reader to focus on the many dangers that turtles suffer because of human intrusion into their slow and peaceful enjoyment of their environment, and how this fits into a bigger picture of our rushed, dangerous, climate-threatened era.

Turtles and tortoises I have met when traveling

A sea turtle covering itself with sand on a beach in Kona, Hawaii, 2014.

Turtles on a pond near Albuquerque, NM, 2015.

Turtles at Huntley Meadows near Alexandria, VA, 2016.

200-year-old Galapagos tortoises that we saw there in 2010.
Tortoises live on land, while turtles are mainly aquatic.

A tortoise in the Peruvian jungle during our Amazon river trip, 2017.
Tortoises are one of the families in the order of Testudines, which includes all the turtles as well.

It’s spring here, and soon the turtles will be sunning themselves on logs and stones in our local ponds and streams. When I see them in a few days or weeks, I’ll have much more to think about than I usually do!

Photos © 2010-2024 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Critters.