This is the first in a series of diaries about how I went from being a run of the mill animal lover and pet owner to something of an Eastern box turtle maven. It has been a very interesting journey, to say the least.
Up until about ten years ago, I worked at a mom & pop garden center that was about 5 miles away from my home. The garden center had been built on a patch of land near a state highway that had recently been widened, behind a small shopping center.
It was a thriving business, and one of the more pleasant aspects of working there was the variety of wildlife that filtered through the place on a regular basis. Because the staff was comprised of horticulture grads, gardeners, and other folks who just liked being outdoors and working with plants, we all kept the bird feeders well stocked, and the birdbaths cleaned and filled.
There were resident snakes and chipmunks, a pair of red tailed hawks that nested nearby, and on warm evenings the songs of different frogs would fill the air. In the greenhouse there was a thriving population of brown anoles that had hitched rides on the tropical plants that had been shipped up from Florida. If you knew where to look, you could find spotted salamanders, and one early morning in June, I came across an Eastern box turtle that was putting the finishing touches on a nest.
The whole place was alive.
Then, 11 years ago, when the business was no longer able to renew the lease (which had been dirt cheap until then), the owners, who were not ready to close up shop, were compelled to relocate. The owners bought land adjacent to an different existing shopping center another 5 miles away.
The new place had more land, a bigger, newer building, and many other improvements over the old place.
Except that it wasn't alive. There were no frogs. No birds to speak of, no chipmunks, not even any snakes to startle us. So in addition to all of the other changes, including the fourth year of drought, there was the sterility of the place that was contributing to the stress and blue mood. Until one evening in late spring, when a box turtle showed up and dug a nest. She laid several eggs in the mulch, and the staff sprang in to action. The immediate area surrounding the nest was cordoned off, and we made a makeshift screened box to protect the nest from any predators that might wander through.
And then it hit me. There were box turtles back at the old garden center location, and they were going to be bulldozed to make room for a newer, bigger shopping center. Those little turtles didn't stand a chance.
So, I did what any moderately unbalanced middle-aged animal lover would do. I decided to go back to the old location and rescue as many turtles as I could possibly find. Some zoning issues were being resolved, and so construction had been delayed. No bulldozing or construction had even started. The lot was deserted, and all that remained of the original business was literally the footprint of a couple of structures and some drift fencing that was put in place to mitigate erosion.
I went nearly every day after work that summer and looked around as best as I could, without success. In those early days, the only turtle I found was the bleached carapace of a turtle that had been long dead. I started to feel depressed, thinking that the whole notion was completely futile.
Finally in August, it rained. I went again to the lot, and picked my way down to the grassy area where the office trailers had been, near the one still-recognizable landmark, a curly willow, and there she was.
I'd almost stepped on her. A young box turtle that would change a lot of things in my life. I named her Ruby.