Running a Tortoise Taxi

Tortoises and turtles are not to be trusted. For all that they carry the weight of the world (plus four elephants) on their backs, at their core they are heartless reptiles who use their shells to hide from their own sins. Cold blooded by nature, cold-hearted by choice.  

First, let me introduce Shelly, a tortoise that a family friend had rescued from her son’s Montessori classroom. Shelly lived a life of leisure, punctuating strolls in the vegetable garden and naps underneath the raspberry patch with plotting world domination.

At some point during Shelly’s retirement, her new owner decided to give her a little bit of minced meat and the placid creature turned into a predator that should have been contained behind razor wire and steel bars. I tortoise-sat Shelly for one terrifying weekend and feeding time required fast fingers and nerves of steel. The taste of flesh awoke something inside of her that refused to go dormant again. She attacked the meat with enthusiasm that suggested that inside that lentil-sized brain was a desire to taste human flesh, preferably mine. Ever since then I have treated her and her ilk with extreme suspicion. Shelly went missing several years ago. Her owner is heartbroken. I am terrified. There is no doubt in my mind that she escaped her enclosure to hunt me down and is making her way toward me day by day, one ponderous step at a time. 

It’s not just tortoises that are armored psychopaths unhindered by the burden of a conscience. Once, when I was scouring a construction site for ground-nesting birds, my coworker and I found a large snapping turtle that had been awakened by the bulldozers and excavators. It left its winter torpor in the mud and clawed its way to the surface where it lay with bleary eyes as it slowly woke up and took in the changed world around it. It lay there, disoriented, with heavy machinery driving around and making the earth shake, patches of clay and grass still sticking to its carapace so that it resembled a miniature island with a tail. It did what snapping turtles do best: it started snapping.

The best way to pick up a snapping turtle is at the back of their carapace, with one hand above each of their rear legs. Unfortunately, most snapping turtles don’t know this and are extremely uncooperative. After some failed attempts that resulted in my coworker almost losing his thumb, we figured out a strategy. I distracted the turtle from the front by doing my best imitation of a dancing worm while he picked it up. We made quite the sight, two biologists in hard hats and hi-viz vests, one carrying an increasingly angry turtle and the other leading the group to the nearest pond in a shimmy. All we needed was some mystical chanting and we would have looked like a very exclusive cult. A construction worker craned his head out the window of his pickup truck to watch the procession. He did not offer to help.

One of the many great things about birds is that they are neither tortoises nor turtles so I can largely avoid the shelled demons. It’s yet another example of how ornithologists are superior to herpetologists.

Given my deep-seated mistrust of tortoises, I’m still not entirely sure how I ended up operating a tortoise taxi in the great plains states for 3 months this summer. I was supposed to be surveying for birds and adding new species like varied buntings and scissor-tailed flycatchers to my life list, but instead I was pulling my car over to ferry my sworn enemy across roads.

There were so many of them, on country roads and highways, box turtles, snapping turtles, painted turtles and red-eared sliders. I almost ran over the first one I saw, convinced it was Shelly trying to murder me by forcing me into a car crash. Instead, I pulled over and saw it was an entirely different tortoise (although by no means innocent).

Every day I would see another of my nemeses on the road, sometimes walking doggedly to the far side, sometimes withdrawn into their shells while diesel engines roared by. Pulling your head and limbs inside a carapace and staying put works well as a defense strategy when your main threat is something trying to eat you. It’s useless when your main predator becomes 4,000lbs of steel powered by compacted dinosaurs. It really wasn’t a fair fight. The sight was sad enough to make me start pulling over to help them across the road, even though they would not hesitate to come for my jugular if the roles were reversed. Luckily for them, I have a stronger moral compass than they do.

Thus began my summer of the Tortoise Taxi. They expressed their gratitude by expressing their bladders on me, hissing, or hiding in their shells and glaring at me in a way that made it clear they would attack if only I weren’t holding them in mid-air.

Sometimes the Tortoise Taxi arrived too late, and I would pull over to see a crushed carapace, a smear of blood on the asphalt, and the crushing sense that the great plains had become a little less wild.

Not everyone was willing to extend an olive branch to humanity’s greatest enemy. But when I started helping, there was an interesting phenomenon: other cars would stop too. Sometimes they would put on their hazards to slow traffic, sometimes they would offer to help. When I was persuading a snapping turtle the size of a manhole cover to stop trying to eat my wrists, a truck rolled to a stop next to me and the driver rolled down the window.

“You’re supposed to pick them up from the back,” he drawled. Then he watched me wrestle the reptile off the road from the safety of his truck. This was not nearly as helpful as he seemed to think it was.

“Is that a snapping turtle?” His wife (or mistress) asked from the passenger seat. I told her it was and frog-marched the turtle to the nearest pond.

“I’ve never seen one before! Is this your job or something?”

Was it my job? No it absolutely was not. These creatures and I had no fondness for each other. That shouldn’t matter. Ultimately, I was also driving steel and rubber on roads that used to be prairies and wetlands. The roads had been installed for my ease of travel as much as everyone else’s. If it wasn’t my responsibility to run the Tortoise Taxi, then whose was it? Yes, ultimately road design needs to be more accommodating to wildlife. That will take time, if it happens at all. Until then, the Tortoise Taxi continues to operate.