C o m i n g   T o   G r i p s

A blood-curdling scream pierced the quiet of the morning! It emitted from the back seat where our little daughter and her younger brother had been quietly playing. It jolted me out of my pensive mood as we drove in the early dawn through the unfamiliar back-road landscapes of a new territory.

Shortly after getting started on this particular road trip, we had stopped to rescue a beautiful box turtle from sure catastrophe. We planned to release it in the state park a little further down the road. With my daughter and son in the back seat wanting to hold it for the short duration I thought, why not? I handed it to my son for safe keeping and assured him that box turtles never bite.

To this day he doesn’t remember or won’t admit what transpired between him and that tortoise. But with a crushing pinch like a pair vise-grips, it latched on to one of his fingers--hence the scream. It took a screwdriver and some needle-nose pliers to secure the release of the small finger from that gentle creature’s mouth. My son felt the most pain, of course , but I learned another painfully valuable lesson that day--don’t ever say NEVER or ALWAYS when it involves nature. It seems that there is always an exception crawling around somewhere when you least expect it.

This little hinged-shell tortoise and many more like him have since given me many object lessons to draw from. Box turtles, gopher tortoises and other like tortoises are slow and secretive, laying their eggs in multiple nest at night and roaming in the shadows of the woodlands during the day. We have observed them often sharing their rain puddles or forest pools with butterflies. These butterflies come to lap up the mineral salts released by the moisture, but the tortoises just come to bask in the cool water and replenish their stored water reserves.

Some of these box turtles are beautifully marked and are over-collected for the pet trade. Living to be 100 years old or more could mean a long miserable life in captivity with many different owners. We need to protect their habitat now more than ever. As always, when the human population requires more living space, the wildlife looses theirs. More knowledge of nature and its requirements should be important to all of us. I am sure that one of the greatest joys of our Creator is for young and old alike to study lessons from His second Great Book--NATURE.

Burney Tompkins

    - Uncle Burney