I was asked recently if I field herp at all, and my answer was that, yes, I do, even when I don't plan to.
This large (12-inch) female snapping turtle was sitting by the curb at the side of the road near our Wal-Mart when I spotted her as I was driving my wife home from work. She had been run over by a car or truck and had a torn-open shell that also had a large crack down the back, and she a severely-broken jaw. I wrapped her in an old blanket that I keep in the car, and my wife held her as we went home.
You can see from the first photo that I first used a quick piece of duct tape to help hold her shell together. Then, because her back injury was so moist, I used water-based latex caulking to seal up her back and stop the bleeding. I used SuperGlue to hold her cracked shell together temporarily, then used epoxy cement to seal it and hold it together more permanently.
Her lower mandible had been broken completely in two, from her lower lip down to her chin, so I SuperGlued that to just hold it for a short while, then used epoxy over cotton/polyester webbing to fix it back together.
You can see that the horny part of her upper mouth had been crushed and broken on the left side, so I eventually removed the broken parts so they wouldn't get in the way when she started to want to eat again (that part of her mouth is made of chitin, like our fingernails, and I knew that it would grow back).
The next day, I went out to check on her and found that flies had laid eggs in her nostrils and in her mouth, so I vacuumed her all out...
...then put her in an aquarium with a couple of inches of water in it (to help support some of her weight) and with a screen cover on it to keep out the flies.
I kept her for a little over a month. She showed signs of healing up, she was moving around a lot (including trying to crawl up out of her tank), I increased the water level in her tank and she showed that she could easily raise her head up out of the water to breathe, so I took her out to the swamp near my home and let her go. It was time that she found a spot to start to hibernate
I hope that she makes it. At least she has a better chance now than she had on that day by the highway. I just wish people would be more careful about avoiding turtles in the road.
