Turtle Power….

We saved a turtle from dying on the road the other day after what we think must have been a car accident.

We still don’t understand how a car could mistake a turtle for anything other than a turtle and wonder why the car couldn’t have swerved to avoid him.

In this case, the vehicle, no license plate provided as the turtle wasn’t quick enough to react and write down the numbers, left this poor little painted turtle on the road, bleeding from the top of the shell and unable to make his way to safety….and by safety, I mean the field where we dumped the python.

Greg, along with desperate pleas from two of our kids and one who merely wanted to yell “turtle!” at it, carried it to the side of our neighbour’s yard and walked away.

I guess we thought the turtle would find his final resting place there rather than being struck over and over until there was a painted turtle pancake in front of the houses and the neighbourhood kids were scarred for life.

The next day, we checked on the turtle and while he hadn’t moved, he wasn’t dead. He (or she but for purposes of this story, I’ll continue to use “he” despite the heavy red and yellow shell make-up) seemed to be able to move his head and one leg but the other might have been paralyzed or he was the world’s best faker and drawing a lot of sympathy from his human audience.

We brought him home and placed him in the culvert at the front of our house and read about what turtles like to eat.

The kids spent some time in the afternoon with a neighbour finding things to feed him and stumbled upon a one eyed tree frog.

The eight year old neighbour explained to our kids that the tree frog ate his own eye because he couldn’t find any other food but assured them it would grow back in six years. This seemed unlikely to me but I allowed the kids to believe it because it was told with authority from someone claiming to have read a book about tree frogs and I had only read one book in the past year about a girl with a dragon tattoo with no mention of anything eating its own eyeballs, I was in no position to argue.

Watching my kids feeding a bug to a turtle and bits of cucumber has rejuvenated my belief in the benefits of roadside assistance.

Ellie told me she was okay feeding the bug to the turtle even though the bug had to die because the turtle was the “needer” of the two animals. If the bug was more “needer” she would have fed the turtle to the bug but that wouldn’t have made any sense. Indeed. Especially because I thought she was saying “neater” for the longest time and until I realized she meant the needier of the two, I continued to look down at the ground and shake my head in sadness for this poor turtle’s suffering and my lack of understanding our conversation.

Greg has asked (twice) if he can bring it inside to keep it safe from both the elements and a turtle-eating-bug until we can take it to the conservation authority tomorrow.

And he thinks he’s going to be able to turn down persistent pleas for a dog?

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