Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell | 
“If you help a female across the road, you must handle her with great gentleness. A turtle who feels threatened will often release urine to startle or deter predators, but a nesting mother who has to do this on the way to the nest has to detour for another drink of water.”
I don‘t remember what this had to do with Jesus or the Bible, but when I was a kid my dad, who is a minister, taught kids how to help a turtle cross without getting peed on.
I always have a deep, deep feeling for the turtles. If I could take their pain for them I would. Caring deeply comes at a cost. The word “compassion,” contains within itself its emotion price. The prefix “com” means “with.” The Latin root “pate” means “suffering.” To feel compassion, therefore, is to enter into another‘s suffering. It is the knowledge that there can never be any peace and joy for me, unless there is peace and joy for you.
Turtles are a red-hot commodity in the worthless world of the illegal wildlife trade. Turtle trafficking is networked, clandestine, and lucrative. A single three-striped Chinese box turtle, whose powdered plastron is rumoured incorrectly to cure cancer can fetch $25,000…Sea turtles, box turtles, spotted turtles, snapping turtles—no turtle is safe. Poachers mine scientific data and scour books and newspapers for clues on where to find them.
Most of us think of turtles as being silent but no, some of them are quite talkative. Various species croak, squeak, belt, whine, and whistle. For the velociraptors park in “Jurassic Park,” filmmakers used the sound of turtles having sex. Some species of Australian river turtle nestlings communicate vocally with each other and with their mothers while still inside the egg.
#FirstLineFridays #FLF @ShyBookOwl
Amid all the other homes on the suburban street—white, grey, beige, pale blue, light yellow—this two-story saltbox stands out.
(My first #AuldLangSpine read from @Chelsea.Poole !)
pickI love this book! Sy Montgomery lives the life I should be living! She works with animals and their carers or those who study them and then writes books about her experiences. She‘s written about octopuses, pigs, and a collection of essays, “How to be a Good Creature”. This one is my favorite of hers I‘ve read so far though. These turtles and the people who serve them have my heart! I admire the rescue organizations Sy mentions in the book.
Tonight‘s #hyggehour involved listening to my husband read from the tagged book. We meant to make a fire in the fireplace, but that didn‘t happen so a YouTube fire it was 😂. I just started a new job last week, so an hour of calm on Sunday nights is perfect before starting another busy week.
Page 5 of this book 🤣🤣. I always knew I liked Sy Montgomery.
pickI really enjoyed Sy‘s recounting of her time learning about a local turtle rescue in New England and the wonderful work they do. Those involved clearly have a deep love for these animals and it made me find them delightful as well. What dragged it down was her repetitive pressing of her politics into the book in a way that didn‘t help the narrative and often distracted from it (and I‘m on the same side of the aisle with her).
pickSy‘s book on octopuses made me give up eating them, and her book about turtles is no less moving. Prevented from traveling a lot for this book due to Covid, she focused on a turtle rescue near her home in Massachusetts. I fell in love with the giant snappers she mostly worked with. I had worked with a few previously as well, and they are much maligned but surprisingly smart and interesting. The people she worked with were very cool, too.
