The Underdog

Never underestimate the ability of the small and meek to overcome adversity–especially when it comes to turtles. This little common musk turtle was brought in last summer with a crush to the center of her carapace. Musks, although common in Connecticut, are actually rarely seen, spending most of their lives well hidden in the streams and ponds they inhabit and not travelling far to nest. When they do get the urge to bask, they climb right up the nearest emergent shrub or tree. This makes them fair game for predators like eagles, who snatch them from the branches and drop them on rocks to crack them open, as gulls do with clams.

Such was apparently the fate of this hapless girl, who must have landed upside down on the rock. Since the fracture was directly over the spine, there was no manipulating the shell fragments into proper position without risking adding to any spinal damage that may have already occurred. All that could be done was to clean, treat and cover the wound and let the miraculous reptile healing process take place. Sure enough, within a few months her carapace was well on its way to regranulation, but her hind legs told another story. While she was able to move them in response to stimulus, she didn’t use them to walk or swim. All locomotion was done by dragging herself around with her front legs–a clear sign of neurological damage caused by spinal injury. This did not bode well for a return to life in the wild, and it certainly seemed like she was destined to become an educational turtle. I set her up in a shallow water habitat for the winter so she could easily reach her floating food without having to swim to the surface, and began to make plans for her placement.

Sunday, while cleaning tanks, I was amazed to notice her seemingly trying to walk on the smooth bottom of her aquarium. It looked as though she was using all her legs, but she couldn’t get any traction on the smooth bottom, so her movements were pretty erratic and I couldn’t be sure that that was normal coordination I was seeing. I quickly added some gravel substrate and quite a bit more water, and…VOILA! Not only did she begin scrambling all around, but also swimming to the surface and climbing her platform. Musks are really comical when they swim–with their long necks stretched out and their tiny webbed feet paddling like there’s no tomorrow, trying to get liftoff of their stout, hamburger-like bodies, there’s usually a lot of bouncing and tipping involved. Compared to other turtles, it hardly looks normal. But to see this little female, whom I’d written off as unreleasable, doing her musk turtle dance after the better part of a year as a handicapped patient, there was no mistaking the perfect normalcy of it. And really, it’s a little victory dance, because she’s going home after all.