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.

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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!

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.

What Are Chelonians, and What Is This All About?

Chelonians are TURTLES, those reptiles with shells, just with a fancier word. (You can use the same word to refer to turtles, as in our lab name, "Chelonian Connection.")

So welcome to our brand new turtle blog! It will introduce our 30-plus years of surprises working with socialized turtles in the Chelonian Connection cognitive lab, now near Portland, Oregon.

Diode thanks you for coming.



What's going to be in it? Look for photos, stories, background, updates on the Ts' doings and accomplishments, samples from our book-in-progress, Diode's Experiment: A Box Turtle Investigates the Human World, and updates on the book, other publications, and appearances. Look too for information about the species that make up most of our study group: North American box turtles (Terrapena carolina and T. ornata) and the strangely flat and fast African pancake tortoises (Malacochersus tornieri).

These turtles have shown their stuff, including balloon play and animal art, at library and class demonstrations and invited lecture/demonstrations at San Francisco State University, the Oakland Museum, and our popular pancake tortoise showcase featured each year at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). We're on the leading edge of exploring cognition from the behavioral side in these understudied animals. Turtles, it turns out, have more cognitive potential than anybody--including me--would ever have dreamed.

Here's a quick intro to Diode, pictured above and--hardly visible--the dark blob in my hands in our profile picture (taken by Dr. Jane Steig Parsons but squeezed down by me). Diode is an eastern box turtle, called "Grandma" when first seen; She's been with me since 1971. She's the mother of six of the turtles in the group. (How old is she? Probably over 70.)

Diode is the hero of the book and of the blog. In 1979, by her charade showing me she understood classifications of objects, she jump-started the research and set me on a path away from teaching music lit in universities and back to grad school in animal behavior and related fields.

If you'd like a quick catch-up on the turtle project, e-mail me and I'll put you on the list for current issues and the several back issues of the Chelonian Connection Newsletter, which the blog will eventually replace.