Any place that’s good for turtles is good for Matt Patterson, and he will go anywhere, and do anything, to observe, to paint, or to help them. Matt’s always ready to head out in his flip-flops to wade into a river or stream or swamp. But as soon as he could, he quit the office to work for himself, concentrating exclusively on wildlife art-creating images so vividly realistic that when I saw a photo of one of his turtle paintings that happened to have his hand in the frame, I thought the hand was fake and the turtle was alive. After graduating from art school, he worked a scant two and a half years as a product design illustrator in different offices, “always looking out the window, dreaming of somewhere else.” One of the offices where he worked was by a river, so he’d bring his kayak so he could fish and look for turtles on his lunch break. It doesn’t seem like a house or an office could hold him for long-and it never has. He’s never lost that boyish Huck Finn attitude, nor his love of outdoor adventure. “I just loved them and wanted them with me so I could watch them.” “We didn’t know back then we were doing anything wrong,” he explains, now fully aware that taking native animals from the wild is illegal. Later, he and his dad built fenced outdoor enclosures for turtles they would find and bring home. His earliest memory is of heading out in a rowboat with his father, a biology teacher, to look for turtles when he was three. “I’ve been a turtle nerd my whole life,” he will tell you proudly. Like me, my friend Matt Patterson, a wildlife artist, loved turtles from an early age. (My parents rushed to replace them before I found out.) All of mine were named Miz Yellow Eyes. When I was growing up in Virginia and New York and New Jersey, every kid had one-often several in succession, because most quickly died. (And also elsewhere-which was why some kids were getting salmonella, and the sale of turtles less than four inches long, the width of a child’s open mouth, was banned in 1975.) Unlike most reptiles, turtles don’t frighten us they seldom bite, and they don’t slither or scurry, but move slowly enough that we can watch them for a while as they charmingly carry their “house” on their back. A baby turtle fits perfectly into a child’s hand. Unlike most reptiles, turtles don’t frighten us.īut it was no wonder these doomed infant turtles were such popular pets. And their food was wrong, too: Most of us were sold ant eggs to feed them, when baby sliders really need a variety of insect and invertebrate prey, as well as vegetables and other plants, to eat. Unfortunately this was a completely inappropriate habitat for animals who should command a home range measured in square kilometers and live for fifty years. Every dime store in the United States carried inch-long baby red-eared sliders in the 1950s, ’60s, and midway through the ’70s-along with tiny round terrariums, each with a spiral ramp topped by a plastic palm tree. Turtles are popular subjects of artwork, collectibles, and toys there is even a Turtle Splash breakfast cereal, which comes with a free baby sea turtle adoption kit.Īlmost everyone has seen a turtle, and most people my age once lived with one. Turtles star as heroes of stories, comics, and movies, from the Tortoise in Aesop’s 2,600-year- old fable, to the Teenage Mutant Ninjas, to wise Crush and little Squirt in Finding Nemo. She has her own Facebook page with more than seven thousand followers. In some cases, this is literal: At New England Aquarium, by far the most popular of its tens of thousands of animals is Myrtle, a ninety-year-old, 550-pound green sea turtle who has lived there since 1970. I’d been thinking about this for some time. Why turtles? Alexxia Bell, Turtle Rescue League’s president and co-founder Natasha have, in their years together, rescued other creatures, from squirrels to salamanders (including a skunk they found on their way to pick up an injured turtle once inside their little car, and with an hour left to travel, the animal, in extremis, sprayed its musk).
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