The Journey Begins…Or, Are You Sure You Want To Do This?

Hello there, and welcome to my turtle blog, wherein I will be chronicling the process I have recently started to become a rehabilitator of wild turtles in Connecticut. I’ve been a turtle owner for well over a decade, but there is a big difference between owning pet turtles who are generally healthy and taking care of sick or injured turtles for the purpose of helping their wild populations, many of which are in decline. There’s a lot to learn, and this is where I’ll (attempt to) write it all down.

I’ve been thinking about becoming a rehabber for a while now (years, in fact), because I care about animals and the environment, and I enjoy being helpful. I grew up watching my dad help rear baby birds that had fallen out of nests, hearing my mom encourage me and my sisters to put spiders outside instead of killing them, and spending a lot of time outside among the critters. When I figured out the best career for me, working with animals wasn’t it, but I still really cared about them and I wanted to be involved somehow. However, nearly as soon as the idea of rehabbing came into my head, I dismissed it, because everything I found that talked about being a rehabber (books, websites, etc.) seemed to be dead-set on convincing people NOT to become one. I was told over and over again that rehabilitating animals is a full-time job that you don’t get paid for and you have to also finance yourself. Everyone I knew or met who was a rehabber didn’t have a 9-5 job that required creatures to stay at home unattended. There’s no way I’d be able to just pop open my desk drawer every two hours to feed a little bird. There’s no way I could regularly take multiple months off of work during the busy season. I couldn’t be available 24/7 to field phone calls and transport animals. I also didn’t have a whole empty floor in my house nor acres of property to build enclosures on. I also wasn’t going to quit my day-job and start a non-profit institution to support my rehabilitator efforts, like so many of the animal-obsessed individuals I had met and talked to. Like many people in my generation, the only thing I have in abundance in my life is student loan debt. I purposely chose a career I would enjoy, but that was at least expected to be financially stable, even if it would never make me rich (I’m a librarian, and you don’t go into this field for the money). It just seemed like the more I investigated rehabbing, the more impractical it became. One more grand idea for the, “If I ever win the lottery” list.

In my job at the library, I regularly book speakers and performers to present programs for families. These include animal programs. Most presenters were from nature centers or other non-profits and clearly had gone all-in on the animal rescue front, be it helping unwanted exotic pets, wild animals, or a combination. Some specialized in one species or group (just bats, just raptors, just reptiles), and others were more generalists. One thing they all seemed to have in common is that they took in every distressed or displaced animal that came their way, growing their operation to fit. I love nature and animals, but love doesn’t pay the bills and there’s no way I could see myself doing that. Also, I do actually really enjoy my job, and I’d miss being a librarian if I went full rescue. One other thing the presenters all had in common was lamenting how few rehabbers there were and how much help the animals all needed, always because of humans encroaching on ever-more wild territory or otherwise making poor decisions that would lead to dire consequences for the animals if someone didn’t step in to help. Every time one of these presenters came in, I felt that tug on my heart and I newly resolved to look into rehabbing animals again (as if something had changed since last time to make it easier to do), to volunteer, to do something! And every time, after talking to the presenter or reading another book or article, I got discouraged because I didn’t want to make it my whole life. And then, I talked to one person, a semi-retired rehabber who didn’t do that full-time anymore, but worked at a nature center and only rehabbed one animal at a time on her own, because that’s all she had room for at the moment. This was the first time the idea of having the power to turn away animals you didn’t have the capacity for, to admit that it’s okay to not take in every animal, that it didn’t have to be your whole life and you could make a difference by helping just one animal, ever came up. I could do that. I could help one animal.

But which one? The person who put this idea of one animal at at time in my head was a bat rehabber, so that was the first one I looked into. I did eventually dismiss bats because I didn’t currently have a suitable space to set them up that would meet the legal qualifications for housing a rabies vector species (RVS in rehabber shorthand), which bats are. While any mammal can contract rabies, rabies vector species like bats and raccoons are considered frequent carriers of the disease and you need special permits and vaccinations and setups to house them. While I have always thought bats were adorable and want to help them, it turned out to just be impractical. Again.

Some time later, I had a turtle rehabilitator come to the library for a talk. She brought a lot of native species that most of the general nature centers and reptile folks don’t have, and she seemed much more about sharing practical, every-day things that people could do to help the wild animals (showing the proper way to help a turtle cross the road, for instance). I talked to her after the presentation and she said that while she was very involved in it, that you didn’t have to make it your sole activity. We talked some more and she said that once they’re past the acute emergency stage, most turtles just need time and that their care isn’t that different from pet turtles. Well, pet turtles I know a lot about. And I have a few extra tanks lying around that they’ve outgrown over the years. It makes perfect sense. Why didn’t it occur to me before? Pet turtles I can do, and surely if they’re as similar to wild ones as she says, maybe I can actually do wildlife rehabilitation after all! Her name was Pam and she was one of only two rehabbers in the state who did turtles, and she lived the next town over from where I worked. What luck!

It was nearing the end of “turtle season”, the warmer months when turtles breed and are thus more frequently out and about looking for mates, nesting sites, or ponds, so there wasn’t a ton that needed doing right away, but my husband, Bobby, and I wanted to at least see what it looked like to rehabilitate turtles, to see if we really had the capacity to do this. After my many emailed questions about rehab were answered, we set up a time for Bobby and I to tour the “facility”, as it were (i.e. – her house, cellar, and yard where recovering turtles were kept until they were healed and able to be released back into the wild). She must have had more than 50 of them, all species and sizes, in all different stages of recovery. We came home with one unreleasable turtle to get started. We kept him for a few months and got attached to him, but eventually a nature center that was fully licensed to keep unreleasable turtles had a space open up for him and we had to give him up. It was sad, but he’ll be in good hands and he’ll be an ambassador for turtles everywhere, teaching people about the turtles that live around here.

It was after this that I got around to contacting the DEEP (Department of Energy & Environmental Protection) that oversees rehabilitator licenses, to be put on the list for the next exam. I have to pause here and say that a big part of why I didn’t do it sooner is that their website regarding rehabbing was totally confusing. It said that you needed four things to become a rehabber: pass the test, put in an application, get a cooperating veterinarian, and do 40 hours under an already-licensed rehabber. However, under each section telling you how to accomplish that task, they said that two other tasks were pre-requisites. If you went to the supposedly pre-requisite task, it said that you had to do the first task before doing this one. This kind of circular logic was present throughout the whole explanation in every part of the site and it seemed like there was no proper step that was possible to do first. So, like any person interested in a new thing but finding the process to entry confusing and designed to keep people out, I gave up. I can’t even tell you how many times I gave up over the years and went back later, hoping that they’d have made the site less confusing. I’m sure I could have called or emailed before then to get answers, but I don’t actually like having to contact a place to find out about them. I want all the information up front, presented clearly, on their website. Not shockingly, the website is still kind of garbage and not user-friendly at all, but, after emailing the people about the exam, I was informed that you can do the steps in any order, as long as it’s within a certain timeframe. Then just fucking say that! I was so mad that I’d been dancing around this confusing and seemingly impossible process for so long when all it would take was one sentence written at the top of the web page to make everything clear. I couldn’t help but wonder how many other potential rehabilitators took one look at their website and said, “Nope, not for me. They don’t seem to know which way is up. Not gonna bother if I can’t get a straight answer.” Maybe it’s just me; I don’t know.

At any rate, they sent me a study manual and practice test, and said they’d email me when they had scheduled the next exam (it’s only once a year). In roughly 300 pages of material, I’d say maybe a page and a half of it had to do with turtles. The exam licenses you to care for non-migrating birds, reptiles, amphibians, and most small mammals, and the questions also talk about how to care for migrating birds, raptors, foxes, raccoons, deer, and a whole bunch of other animals I will never take in. So it was 99% useless to me. On top of that, it seemed to push going to the vet for every damn thing, like being a rehabber was just feeding animals and keeping them warm. All the first-hand accounts of rehabbing I’d read and people I’d talked to said pretty much the opposite: experienced rehabbers could fix just about anything and only consulted a veterinarian in extreme or complicated cases. One would expect the public to be clueless about most rehabbing situations, but I had thought that the people in charge of licensing new rehabbers would maybe know more about turtle care than me. The bits of information I did retain from the manual had nothing to do with turtles, but they did make me more paranoid about coming in contact with wild animals. Mouse poop can kill you if you breath it in, raccoon poop needs to be disposed of with a blowtorch because it can also kill you, pretty much anything with fur or feathers has some nasty-ass parasite or germ that doesn’t affect them but will kill human beings. Bleach is your friend.

After reading the manual (I’d have to wait a few more months before they offered the test again), I got back in touch with Pam so I could do my 40 hours of tutelage with her and learn everything the manual didn’t tell me about being a turtle rehabilitator in the state of Connecticut. This blog will mainly be me talking about what I do when I go over to her house to learn about turtles. I’ll take pictures, too, when I can.

Thanks for stopping by!