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Photo credit: Lynn Nakamura




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Where to Find TURTLES ALL THE WAY: POEMS

Finally, the publisher understands that yes, I paid for the copies of my books I ordered last year, and the box has arrived. (What a relief!)

Well, look what's here!

What excited turtles--scrambling off in opposite directions!
Willow checks out the cover: her drawing. Diode is the subject of several poems.

In the Portland metro area, the books are available at the following independent stores:

Another Read Through
Broadway Books
Powell's and Powells.com (offsite warehouse)
Hillsboro Community & Senior Center: Eighth Avenue Gifts
Wordstock at Oregon Writers Colony table: 12:30-2:00, November 11, 2017

Publisher placed it on Amazon, including U.S., Britain, and elsewhere.

Finishing Line Press price is $14.95 plus S&H. My price is $14.95, including S&H (rosemarydlombard AT y a h o o D O T com--or for a special price at readings.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF THE SHELLED!

Anthony Pfannenstiel (poet, editor/publisher of Fault Lines Poetry: Poems for People, and former host, Free Range Poetry, Portland, Oregon) says, "I truly enjoyed and admired Rosemary Lombard's turtle poems. How fascinating for me to look through the eyes of a turtle. She captured something priceless."


Other placements are in progress, and word will appear here if I can figure out how to revise the post!

NEWS: INCLUDING "THE WRITING LIFE" TV INTERVIEW

I apologize for an extended absence from the blog. Such busy days! Fourteen turtles to care for and work with, plus writing, events to participate in and attend, and, of course, all the things we all have to do to live in a home. There is much to catch up on, and (hint, hint) more good news is expected to land on my doorstep this week. Watch for announcements in Facebook (Rosemary Lombard—a public site), Twitter (@tortoogal), and here.

 TV Interview on “The Writing Life”

 

Last week, host Stephen W Long interviewed me on his television series, “The Writing Life,” now on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcIl3733Tts&feature=youtu.be ). It was great fun! Most of Stephen’s questions were about turtles, particularly the Chelonian Connection turtles and some of our surprises in the first years of exploring their potential. Writing about them for years in daily behavioral accounts prepared me for my public writing life. Toward the end of the program I read from my chapbook, Turtles All the Way: Poems.

Shotpouch Residency

In May, I spent a refreshing two-plus days—about as long as I care to be away from the lab—at my fourth residency at Shotpouch Cabin in the Coast Range west of Corvallis, at a lovely, forested site run by Oregon State U’s Spring Creek Project. The Project’s goal, which I affirm with enthusiasm, is to “bring together the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the clarity of philosophical analysis, and the creative, expressive power of the written word, to find new ways to understand and re-imagine our relation to the natural world. “ Again, my collaborator was one of the turtles from the cognition lab, this time Jo, one of Diode’s daughters, now 27 years old. We wrote and drew. Jo has been drawing since 2008. (See post on “art.”)

 

Jo, sitting on my hand, slid her beak over the paper mounted on the window, stretching her neck and sometimes rotating it for the curved lines. For lines longer than she could otherwise reach, she pushed against the paper with her feet. I memorized one stroke at a time and drew it with a marker. We call this drawing "Turquoise Plants."

 

 

Here Jo illustrates the structure of the forest: the creek, bank, shrubs, elevation, types of trees, and mountains.

 

Joe's third picture represents herself and me in our respective hats--hers imaginary, mine my usual sunhat. I appear to be climbing up the trail on one of our hikes, normally with Jo steering in my hand.



 

 

Writing Craft for Animal Advocacy

Much thought and time went into an extended essay, “A Case for More Reality in Writing for Animals.” written from a biologist’s standpoint on that aspect of writing for the benefit of animals. It will appear in a book that publisher Ashland Creek Press calls (for now) Writing for Animals: An anthology for writers and instructors to educate and inspire."Writing for animals" is intended in the sense of "for the benefit" of animals. The project also included arranging for permissions and recommending and annotating resources for the back matter of the book.

  

Upcoming Events

 

Watch for the book launch and other readings coming up, too. Dates and venues tba.

September 16–17, 2017. Book fair, panel, and presentations. My panel, on prewriting and research, is Saturday the 16th at 11 a.m., Main Library, Hillsboro, Oregon. Free. Turtles All the Way: Poems is expected to be available for purchase.

October 1, 2017. Reading from Turtles All the Way: Poems at poet Penelope Scambly Schott’s White Dog Salon, Portland. Other readers: John Miller, Diane Colson, Bruce Parker. Contact me for an invitation. (rosemarydlombard@yahoo.com)

February 14, 2018. Turtle program 3 for the younger set. North Plains Library, North Plains, Oregon

TURTLES ALL THE WAY: POEMS

 

 

I’m excited that Finishing Line Press has announced my forthcoming chapbook of poems, all about turtles. There are multiple poetry books about (and “by”) dogs and cats, but turtles? No; and so many people tell me about their turtle loves. On the pages you’ll meet a sea turtle, box turtles, and pancake tortoises, especially those at our Chelonian Connection lab.

 

My page on the Press’s site, includes an endorsement by Ingrid Wendt, winner of the Oregon Book Award, one of three endorsements that make me very grateful.

https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?cPath=4&products_id=2661

 (The publisher offers a discounted S&H rate during the prepublication window: until June 17, 2016. Books are scheduled to ship on August 12.)

 

Readers of this blog may know that I’m not only an animal behaviorist, herpetologist, and naturalist who—with a bale of box turtles and pancake tortoises who are both socialized family animals and colleagues in our

exploration—has been exploring turtle cognition in our- independent lab since 1979. I’m also a prize-winning poet and nonfiction writer. Of course I write turtle poems!

 

 

Here are four sample snippets, followed by one of the back-cover blurbs, this one by Robert Michael Pyle.

 From  “Wafford’s Eyes.” ….Each shining bead reflects a single star but hides / your mysteries behind their blackness. // Tell me, tortoise the size of my hand, how can I read their secrets?

 From “Aesop’s Winter Race.” “Like slow tortoise, degreed for persistence, / the snowflakes slowly race / toward piled higher, piled deeper / than ever before in this place. / … / Like rabbit, cars forget the old race / and seek a sheltered place to sleep, / the road abandoned, tracks effaced / while snowflakes earn their Ph.D.

 From “Flick of an Eyebrow.” ….What matters is...the surge of her tortoise muscles a motor against my hand / that somehow lifts my feet to follow her will, // and the moments a happy conjunction of words slides together amid the wonder of near-infinite combination.

 From “Communication.” ….Diode, at my feet, attentive, / her head angled up toward the birds / from brown, sun-dappled leaves, // hasn’t moved a muscle since we settled here. / Now the birds are farther off, / and gusts of wind are shaking the canopy. // Trees say to each other, Sway. / We sit still and listen.

 

"Rosemary Lombard loves turtles so much so that she flies and waltzes them through the air, helps their probing beaks reach the columbines they love, takes their gestures and meaning down in penciled runes. These might not be the luckiest turtles in the world, but close, and we are among the luckiest of readers to get to wander with them the grasses of Kilimanjaro, the trillium woods of home, beneath the Harvest Moon. In poems of great inventiveness, delicacy, and precision, Ms. Lombard teaches us more about the lives, perceptions, and dreams of turtles and tortoises than we might learn in a lifetime trying by ourselves, as we “plod with (our) ground-bound feet on the earth.” Happily, she looks right into their eyes that are “midnight skies of miniature worlds,” and brings those secret worlds of turtles back to us in these magical poems."

 —Robert Michael Pyle, author of Evolution of the Genus Iris and Chinook & Chanterelle; Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing

 

 

Illustrations. Cover image  is a self-portrait by pancake tortoise Willow, who was using a mirror. See the post on art by the turtles. The turtles have demonstrated this ability in many venues: universities, art galleries, a cultural arts center, nature centers, and science museums.

 

Box turtle Diode with Rosemary at Shotpouch Cabin at our 2014 residency  sponsored by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. Photograph by Lynn Nakamura, Eugene, Oregon, first presented in our report, A Captive Turtle Revisits the Wild: A Human-Turtle Collaboration, limited edition.

 

Pancake tortoise Willow. Here's lookin' at you!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DIODE AND THE DRAGON TAP TARGETS

 

On one recent morning two attentive turtles, including Diode, the eastern box turtle matriarch of the lab, were watching an online video from my hands. I’d blown it up to the full size of the monitor, and several other turtles with good sight lines were oriented toward it, too. A nine-foot-long

Sunny with his GoPro camera.

Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) was lumbering toward a yellow circle on the end of a stick held by a San Diego Zoo keeper. In his other hand, hidden behind him, the keeper held a red grabber holding a fish. The dragon, Sunny, touched the yellow circle with his nose, then turned toward the side where the treat usually appeared. When it did, he grabbed it, and it was gone in a flash.

Sunny hits the target.

               In a video on the second site, below, note that the treat and the yellow disc are both held in front of the trainer, apparently at a later stage of training. Sunny still touched the yellow disc before grabbing the reward. The video showed Sunny repeating the task several times.

               During one repetition, Diode pushed on my hand—hard—toward the computer monitor.

 

Recreation of Diode approaching the target on the computer monitor

She tapped the yellow disc, then steered to the kitchen and tapped the refrigerator.

       I was surprised but got the point. I opened the fridge door and fetched her a night crawler. She ate it nearly as fast as the Komodo dragon. Tapping the refrigerator directly would have cued me that she wanted to eat, but she showed she could play the target game, too. Did she see the game as yet another way to control me—not the other way around?



Bingo! Diode recreates tapping the target.

              

       I find the work with this largest species of monitor lizard fascinating. Though the training relies on no more than a Pavlovian association (like Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the bell), it shows that even a huge and very dangerous lizard* can be trained so that he can be maneuvered for veterinary work and other purposes, and it demonstrates a level of brainwork that’s of interest to scientists working in comparative cognition. There are benefits for the dragon as well. Working for food has been shown to be a valuable enrichment for confined animals. Using the mind is one benefit; exercise is another. Otherwise, there isn’t much motivation to run in a zoo enclosure. For all of these reasons, Komodo dragons have been trained in other zoos, including London Zoo and the National Zoological Gardens in South Africa (link below with training how-to information, but don’t try this at home—with a Komodo dragon, that is).

               Diode, as you see in these recreations for the camera, did try it at home—though not my idea. Diode has not been trained to get food by tapping a yellow disc—or any other way. She imitated the dragon’s successful target tap on the second time she saw the video. She steered to the screen in my right hand as I held the camera in the left (not too easy in real time). Some shots missed entirely, but two (above) caught the action.

 

 

Diode approaches a virtual nose bump with Sunny,

again a photo with a live, moving Diode and the video.

No animals have been injured in these photographs.

        Readers, I’d love to hear your comments.

 

References

“How to train your Komodo dragon: Sunny the lizard wears a GoPro camera as he runs towards targets at the zoo.”

www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2771088/How-train-komodo-dragon-Sunny-lizard-wears-GoPro-camera-runs-targets-zoo.html

 

“How to Train Your Komodo Dragon,” www.breakingnews.ie/discover/how-to-train-your-komodo-dragon-643293.html

Training Komodo dragons at the National Zoological Gardens in South Africa: www.nzg.ac.za/newsletter/issues/19/01.php

*Notice the cautious length of the sticks; even if a bitten deer or other prey escapes, the Komodo dragon bite can kill from “a sophisticated combined-arsenal killing apparatus,” primarily their venom, which affects blood coagulation and induces shock. Venom now appears to be more important for the kill than toxic bacteria.

Bryan G. Fry et al. A central role for venom in predation by Varanus komodoensis (Komodo Dragon) and the extinct giant Varanus (Megalania) priscus. PNAS June 2, 2009, vol. 106 no. 22, pp. 8969-8974. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8969.full

TURTLE ART IN JURIED SHOW AUGUST 1

Readers of this blog know that the turtles of our Chelonian Connection lab for exploring turtle cognition have learned to draw by sliding their beaks over vertically mounted paper and have presented demonstrations in various venues. Tomorrow (Friday, August 1, 2014) is another such demonstration.

 

 

A friend, knowing the turtles’ work, had suggested that we submit turtle art to a call for a juried show, “The Magic and Power of Words,” at the North Bank Gallery in Vancouver, Washington, in which art and words relating to love would be integrated. Four turtles followed up the idea with two solo drawings and one collaborative piece, and I submitted photos of the work. Happily, two drawings were selected for the show—one by a pancake tortoise (one of Willow’s daughters) and one by a box turtle (one of Diode’s daughters).

 

They are quite good at drawing letters. The pictures were successful in my view, and I framed the pictures and drove them to the gallery. I feel a bit anxious about deciding we could let these original drawings be offered for sale. We have offered some reproductions (at the OMSI science museum store and elsewhere), but originals never before.

 So tomorrow we travel to Vancouver for the opening reception, at which some of the writers and artists are speaking. Our contribution will be a drawing demo with the two turtles, our second gallery event, the other in connection with a reading from my book at a Forest Grove gallery. I hope to have some photos for the blog.

For Portland/Vancouver locals, here are the specifics about the event.

North Bank Gallery, 1005 Main Street, Vancouver, WA 98660

5:00-9:00 p.m., with readings on the hour from five to eight

Turtle demo at 7:00 or 7:10

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Radiated Tortoise

The radiated tortoise is too beautiful and, it's said, too delicious for its own good. Along with the resulting poaching for pets and for the upscale restaurant market, the rapid destruction of its forest habitat in south Madagascar points to a fast path toward extinction. Now it's one of the most critically endangered of turtle species.This short movie (URL below) tells the story of returning a cargo of confiscated radiated tortoises to their homeland and the education efforts in its region to return the tortoise to its traditionally protected status by the local population. It's nine minutes well spent.

   http://www.turtlesurvival.org/blog/1-blog/183-film-highlights-growing-radiated-tortoise-crisis   

Ancient Alien Friend

Here's another adaptation from Diode's Experiment: A Box Turtle Investigates the Human World, a work in progress. Enjoy!
 

Milwaukee River, detail.
C. Douglas Babcock; my collection


On the river--hard on the river--I could see the painted turtle's beak pushing so hard on the glass I was glad we'd had the watercolor framed. His pointer beak pressed on the far shore of the riverscape my father-in-law had painted from the bridge down the street. Curious, I thought, but then this wild turtle pushed a foot against my hand, pivoting, and I followed his canoeing to the porch window, which looked over the bluff toward the water, still visible through the leafless trees of the year's early spring. He looked down at the real river, then angled upstream a bit, and banged his beak on the window. Now I knew exactly what he meant.
     The night before, in the midst of a wretched week of tornadoes and worry and exhausting hours of searching, Michael and I, on the way home for sustenance, had seen our screen door angled out. Trudging steps began to fly, and we ran the last leg home. As we approached we saw a boot box, and it seemed to be scratching. We tore off the string and the box top, then, seeing what was not there, broke off in silence.
     The full-grown midland painted turtle, Chrysemys picta marginata, filled the space. We knew why he was there. We had posted fliers high and low picturing a flat tortoise: lost, heartwrenchingly lost. On a supervised walk in the wilds of an unkempt park between a railroad track and the raging Milwaukee River, she had, as John Updike put it, melted into grass: Willow, a rare African pancake tortoise, part of the family and part of our mutual explorations into symbolic communication. We were desperate to find her.
     I suppose it wasn't surprising that some of the turtles purporting to be the pancake-slender Willow were water turtles. Their aquatic lifestyle has made them flatter than the typical arch of terrestrial species. True, "flat" was the defining characteristic we sought, but not a hydrodynamically sleek--but only rather flat--swimmer.
     A note in the turtle's box expressed the hope that the turtle was Willow and asked that, if it was not, we return it to the given location. I didn't recognize the west-side address, and we decided to return him to his neighborhood the next day.
     When I lifted him from the shoebox, he pulled inside his shield of a shell, ornately decorated with the red marks around the edges that give the species its name; but I held him patiently, and, as usual with turtles, curiosity won. He poked his head out surreptitiously, looking at the unfamiliar surroundings of a house. Gaining more confidence, he extended his limbs and started to struggle for freedom, but I responded by turning in the direction of his struggling and walking that way. Within seconds he relaxed and simply pushed on my hands in the way the other turtles of the study group steered us to show their needs and interests.
     Michael stood in a doorway holding two of our turtles, who, seeing the uninvited stranger in my hands looking at them, stared back with no hint of a friendly overture. The painted turtle turned away, rubbernecking like any tourist to examine details all over the house, marking the human strangeness of the way we lived: the enclosing squareness of it, the calm aerial turtles, the oddity of television.
     It was the next morning when the turtle discovered the painting and tapped the window facing the river. This time I looked more carefully at the address on the note and looked it up on a map. It was where the turtle had pointed.
     We drove over the bridge to the address, a block or so from the river, and parked on the quiet lane. I was holding the turtle, and he steered down the lane under the Gothic arches of the elms in the direction of the river, his back legs alternating strokes against my hands, so he swayed back and forth as I walked.
     Michael, still exhausted, lagged behind, and from time to time the turtle would pivot me around and stop, looking at Michael for a moment before resuming his journey toward the river.


A midland painted turtle. James H. Harding in
 CalPhotos; under Creative Commons license

      At the flat bank by the edge of the water I stopped while the turtle, now motionless, surveyed the river and Michael caught up. I leaned down and set the turtle gently on the mud. He waited there a moment before swimming off in slow, relaxed strokes, his carapace and head still visible. From time to time he hesitated and pulled his head around to look back at us. Finally, he dipped under and disappeared.
     It seemed as if we had met and befriended another member of an alien order just arrived on Earth, just as he had learned to trust us members of our soft and gangly species. But, of course, we were the new kids on the planet, not the turtles.
     Different as we were, we were learning to understand each other. But we couldn't interpret his slow return to the river and his ambiguous hesitations precisely enough to know what he was thinking. Was he thanking us for an adventurous vacation with our species, alien to him--and returning him to his home? Was he amazed that his gestures had told us his place on the river? Or did he want to stay in our world? I'll never know.

If you enjoy this blog, please sign up for e-mail notices so you'll know when a new issue appears; it doesn't happen often.

Prize Story Live in Portland

Here, below, see the promised details on a reading of  "Diode," a new and improved adaptation of Part I of the book-in-progress, Diode's Experiment: A Box Turtle Investigates the Human World. We were delighted that the story won the 2011 first prize in the Kay Snow Award nonfiction division. (The response of the judges' table at the award ceremony was a unison yell of "DIODE!" Hilarious.)

I'll be reading on Wednesday, February 1, 2012, seven o' clock, at the Blackbird Wine Shop, 4323 NE Fremont Street, Portland, OR 97213, (503) 282-1887, along with wonderful writers Sue Parman, Fred Melden, and Sharon Davis Appleman. The program is a mix of stories and poetry, plus the deliciousness of deli plates and glasses of wine to buy for accompaniment. The First Wednesday series, short of those options, is free.

And here is another shot of Diode herself, still with me after forty years, staring at me with her why-are-you-confronting-me-with-that-camera-again expression. She has climbed up on a shelter in the turtles' favorite spot (the favorite, that is, except for summertime afternoons outside): the lab's six-foot garden window, which looks out at the backyard and rear deck. I had an acrylic barrier made for the room side of the space, so, if you're wondering, it's safe.

DIODE!

Lost and Found: Hope for Lonesome George and Other 'Extinct' Species?

Does the doom and gloom of our rapid-fire extinction of Earth’s species sometimes get to you? It does to me, and it hits especially hard to see turtles as the group hit hardest by threats of continued extinctions: forty to fifty percent of the 300 or so species with a high level of threat.  (See, in this blog, “The Year of the Turtle and World Turtle Day,” May 24, 2011.) Yes, we have lost and nearly lost many species, primarily to human predation, habitat loss, and wild collection. Sometimes we take it as a call to action; other times all we want to do is to cover our eyes and ears like the “I see no evil”/“I hear no evil” monkeys.

But there are times when a ray of sunshine shines through the depressive statistics, at least on the small scale: the survival or possible survival of individuals of species once thought lost. Think of the excitement surrounding the ivory-billed woodpecker and the great search for survivors. Better, where there is one or even possibly one, perhaps there are others.

Now we know that Lonesome George, the famous Galapagos tortoise thought otherwise extinct, has relatives on another island bearing some of his species’ genes, opening new possibilities of finding a mate for him—perhaps in captive populations, perhaps on his relatives’ island; and who knows in these early days of genetic manipulation what can eventually be done. Certainly that would be a use of the developing technology that everyone could embrace.



One of the hybrid Galapagos tortoises found on Isabela

Island, a hope for bringing back a species thought extinct.



Recently a paper came out in Current Biology saying that one of the other Galapagos tortoise species, Geochelonoidis elephantopus of Floreana Island, thought extinct, also has relatives, but on Isabela Island, two hundred miles away from their one-time home. From genetic analysis, it looks as if hybridization has been happening for the two hundred or so years since ships started to deposit tortoises from one island onto another. What is most hopeful is that 30 of the 84 hybrids found so far are not more than fifteen years old: young enough that purebred parents are “likely” to be found. Ryan Garrick and his coauthors say that if they are found, they “could constitute core founders of a captive breeding program directed toward resurrecting this species.”

Even if purebred G. elephantopus parents are not found, like Lonesome George, even close relatives may provide possibilities of recovery down the line. As Ryan Garrick and his coauthors conclude, the legacy of hybridization “may occasionally be the creation of opportunities to resuscitate imperiled species.”

Jennifer Welsh, as “‛Extinct’ Galapagos Tortoise Reappears” and “No Longer Extinct? Traces of Giant Tortoises Found.” January 9, 2012. http://www.livescience.com/17807-galapagos-tortoise-reappears.html; also, under the second title, at http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57355283/no-longer-extinct-traces-of-giant-tortoises-found/.

 For Garrick et al. and other relevant original papers, including the one on Lonesome George, see: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/searchresults?searchText=galapagos+tortoise&searchBy=fulltext

and M.A. Russello et al., “DNA from the past informs ex situ conservation for the future: an ‘extinct’ species of Galápagos tortoise identified in captivity.” PLoS One. 2010 Jan 13;5(1):e8683.

Also see the following fine books:

Paul Chambers. A Sheltered Life: The Unexpected History of the Giant Tortoise. London: John Murray, 2004.

Henry Nicholls, Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon. Basingstoke Hampshire, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan/Macmillan, 2006; and, as a paperback, Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of the World’s Most Famous Tortoise. London: Pan Macmillan, 2007.

Craig B. Stanford, The Last Tortoise: A Tale of Extinction in Our Lifetime. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

How Turtles Draw

Art by apes and elephants, with varying degrees of human assistance, has captured the interest of scientists, animal lovers, and the art world. The turtles of Chelonian Connection, an independent laboratory exploring the cognitive abilities of turtles for over thirty years, are the first reptiles to learn to draw. This activity provides a favored behavioral enrichment for the turtles of the lab. The pancake tortoises of the study group first publicly demonstrated the procedure at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s 2008 Reptile and Amphibian Show and have participated in the lecture-demonstrations each subsequent year. Other species creating drawings at the lab include eastern and ornate box turtles and a Russian tortoise.

How do the turtles draw? 

• The human assistant mounts paper on a vertical surface or an easel, and the turtle paddles through the air on the assistant’s hand, pushing with the other feet on available parts of the hand (clarifying the direction of movement) and inclines her head to indicate a marker (usually black or red).
• The turtle steers in the same way toward the paper and touches it with her beak to indicate the starting point for the first line.
• The assistant marks the spot.
• The turtle returns to the starting spot for the first line and each of the following lines and stretches out her neck, drawing her beak across the paper in a straight line or curve.



Eastern box turtle Diode pushes with
considerable pressure against the paper.

• The assistant, keeping the hand steady, watches the direction and shape of each line and reproduces it with the marker. Only if the indicated line is stretching beyond the turtle’s neck reach does the assistant move the supporting hand in the direction the turtle is indicating.

Subjects, among others, include animals, flowers, houses, people, and abstract designs. The figurative drawings are completed with lines in a seemingly random order; rarely does the assistant or viewer guess the subject until the drawing is nearly done, unless the turtle is looking at a model.

Diode and pancake tortoise Willow pose by two of the
pumpkin faces drawn by them and the other chelonians
of the lab, one feature per individual.

Further discussion of the turtles’ art and other accomplishments will be found in forthcoming book Diode’s Experiment: A Box Turtle Investigates the Human World (working title). Diode’s Experiment tells the story of the thirty years of mutual explorations of mind with these socialized turtles. Who could have known that turtles could show such flexible behaviors and creativity?

Chelonian Connection

Hillsboro, Oregon

rosemarydlombard@yahoo.com



PANCAKE TORTOISES AT OMSI and ANGEL REVEALS SECRETS OF MIND

Our Lecture-Demonstration at the OMSI Reptile and Amphibian Show

A pancake tortoise meets one of many visitors. OMSI, 2009
Photo by Sharon Appleman

Saturday, September 3, 2011, we present our fourth annual lecture-demonstration at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s Reptile and Amphibian Show, always on Labor Day Weekend. Other years the show has tallied around 3,000 visitors a day. Our special event is all about the unusual adaptations and accomplishments of the “amazing” East African pancake tortoises in our lab. We (including seven pancake tortoises from the lab) will be in a room near the main exhibit hall between 9:30 and 1:30—Saturday only.
      The computer slide show comes to life when a pancake tortoise meets you, perhaps examining your T-shirt design or jewelry and greets you bolder ones with a turtle-to-turtle greeting: a nose-to-nose push. They will demonstrate their balloon play, mirror play, and procedure in drawing pictures. Some of the better turtle art will be on display.     

      It’s always fun, though tiring, for all of us—the reason we’re limiting our time this year. Come get acquainted while we’re there! There’s more information and a link back to our blog on the OMSI site:  http://www.omsi.edu/reptileshow

Revealing Secrets: Angel Finds a Way

Until I got irritated at reading a whole book at my desktop computer, I was reading a galley version of dolphin researcher Diana Reiss’s forthcoming book, The Dolphin in the Mirror, a very interesting narrative. Her dolphin book, scheduled to appear in stores September 20, is one of a handful for the general reader on long-term studies of captive animals’ cognition that are written by the principal investigator. Thus, like books about Alex the parrot, Koko the gorilla, Kanzi the bonobo, and first signing animal Washoe the chimpanzee, it is a cousin to our Diode’s Experiment. (Funding for behavioral research is tenuous, and a rare study is able to continue for a whole career, so even Diana was not able to study the same dolphins throughout her thirty years of research.) Diana is also featured in the December 2011 issue of Discover magazine.
      Back in the mid eighties, Diana introduced me to her research dolphins (including Circes), John Lilley’s dolphins in adjacent pools, and the set-up for her research, at that time recording and studying dolphin contact calls. Both of us have studied our animals’ vocalizations and mirror self-recognition since the eighties—both with success—but more about the turtles’ sounds and mirror responses another time.
      In her book Reiss notes—and I agree—that if you pay attention to the animals’ interactions, both among themselves and with you, they “often reveal their secrets.” One way they begin this revelation is to show their behavioral flexibility and planning as they try to communicate with a human with whom they’re bonded (and, uh, from whom they want services.) If a lab turtle finds a water dish is, shall we say, “used,” I often see the turtle balanced on the edge of the dish, head bent straight down, staring into the water until I come to change it.

Angel in the Secret Garden

      Here’s a recent example from our lab. Angel, one of Diode’s daughters, found a way to request audio services from the floor. More often, a turtle will steer in hand to the audio equipment or a CD and give it a tap with the beak: the direct approach. This time Angel was walking on the lab floor.

      When I had reorganized books and speakers into a newly-purchased bookcase, I had placed the speakers at either end of the bottom shelf, only three inches above the floor. Angel walked back and forth in front of the long bookcase and stared up at the speaker nearer me each time she passed it, then glanced to my face. After a while I got the idea and put on the next CD.

Hunt in the Secret Garden






A human idea of a natural-roofed shelter. Workshop site at
Graham Oaks Nature Park, Wilsonville, Oregon. Kathleen
Holt, editor, Oregon Humanities; Debra Gwartney; Barry
Lopez; participating writer

 I just attended a wonderful weekend workshop on writing about place with Debra Gwartney and Barry Lopez, sponsored by Portland Metro's parks and Oregon Humanities.
In our brief writing time I chose to write about place on the small scale, specifically, refuges chosen by the Chelonian Connection turtles in their warm afternoons outside, a piece selected to present to the public part of the event. Someone in the audience
suggested I put it on the blog, so here it is.


The Secret Garden in the afternoon.



Hunt in the Secret Garden      

As dusk came on I was down on my knees yet again and wishing I had bought more of the foam garden pads for the Secret Garden. As I’d pointed out at design time, building the top at the four-foot height of the hardware cloth was going make the six by twenty feet of turtle-seeking harder as my time moved on. Where was she? the last to come in for the night. As the turtles were used to the reptile-warm lab room, it would be too cool here in western Oregon to sleep out.

            I knew many of this summer’s hiding places. Small bodies had eased between clumps of the dense bunchgrass I’d planted for tortoise browse and burrowed under the patches of slumped-over lawn grasses, the bottom layers yellowing and decomposing under the unmown weight of slender stems and seeds ripe to fall.

            I slid my probing fingers into a damp under-grass cave I knew, where other box turtles had found shelter, making a warren of muddy depressions. The tips touched something smooth, and the familiar arch fit under the spread of my hand. I smiled: Diode. I wouldn’t need the miner’s light.

            For the second time this summer she had settled here, her shell hidden, head and limbs tucked in under the larger arch of the grasses. Though the bold pattern of her carapace, gold on black, rivaled a zebra’s design for contrast, deep under the parallel stripes and displaced stems of her natural-roof coverlet, she slept in a secure and invisible place.

RECENT AND COMING EVENTS

LECTURE: UC-DAVIS

In July I was invited to lecture for two hours to the animal cognition class and Animal Behavior Group at the University of California-Davis. That made for a quick trip down and back on the scenic Coast Starlight train (arriving and leaving on the same day), an intense but wide-ranging lecture about the cognitive work with the turtles (with lots of photos, plus videos on Diode drawing and mirror self-recognition tests), and a good time with my host and other friends. So two days after I left I was back with the turtles to relieve my sitter. 
WILLAMETTE WRITERS AWARD CEREMONY 
On August 6 at the Willamette Writers Conference, I received the Kay Snow First Prize for nonfiction, a big thrill, plus some cash, which will help with this year's improvements to the lab. The story for which the prize is being awarded adapts key scenes drawn from Part I of my book. Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney were there, too, for Barry received the Willamette Writers lifetime achievement award. 
OMSI LECTURES  SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 
The "amazing" Chelonian Connection pancake tortoises will again be showing off at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry's annual Amphibian and Reptile Show. Our lecture-demos (with lots of pictures on screen, too, of habitat and adaptations) are Saturday morning of Labor Day Weekend from nine to one. You can meet the tortoises with a nose bump (if they think you're an animal person) and watch them play bang-the-balloon and draw. 
READING OF PRIZE STORY                                               

I'll be reading the Kay Snow Award story at the Blackbird Wine Shop series in NE Portland on Wednesday, February 1, 2012. Check later for details.