GLOBE AND MAIL (Toronto, Ontario) 14 June 05 This Country Drivers, please slow down and proceed with caution: Turtle-popping zone ahead (Roy MacGregor)
It's mayhem on the highway.
Bad things, of course, happen all year round on Canadian roads, but there is one particular time of year -- right now -- when a singular massacre takes place that never makes the news or even gets a passing mention in travel advisories.
Turtle popping.
It is a sound well known to those who have stopped to help a slow-moving, oblivious turtle off the pavement, only to have the tires of the next vehicle coming along squash it as surely as a heel on a peanut.
That sound, says Scott Gillingwater, is just about as "heart-wrenching" as it gets.
Gillingwater, who was known as "Turtle boy" when he was younger and is still called "Uncle " by his niece, is with the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority in London, Ont., and this, he says, is as dangerous as it gets if you're a turtle.
The egg-laying reptiles are on the move. Especially the dinosaur-like snappers, their shells often as big as hubcaps, which can take the equivalent of a city rush hour to make it across a two-lane secondary road.
Snapping turtles move as they go through life: slow-motion, prehistoric creatures that sleep in mud all winter, glide all summer through water and have a life expectancy that would be the envy of humans.
If it weren't for the cars.
And, to an unfortunate degree, if it weren't for the commonly held attitude that the world is better off without a scowling creature that can, if so moved, snap a rake in half with its jaws.
Let the rest of the world's sleepless children worry about what's at the foot of the bed at night; Canadian children have to deal with what's under the dock.
"They're just not the monsters people make them out to be," Gillingwater says.
The snapping turtle, in fact, may well be the most Canadian of all the woodland creatures, only lacking the moose's extensive public relations staff and the beaver's preferred presence on the back of the nickel.
Snapping turtles live smack along the border, just like most Canadians, and are found from the Atlantic virtually to the Rockies.
Like human Canadians, they hide away in winter, are shy when out and can turn cranky when prodded, whether by polls or poles.
They are also, as Canadian humans often feel about themselves, little understood. Swimmers run from them, yet they are invariably moving just as fast in the opposite direction. "In 12 years of working professionally with turtles," Gillingwater says, "I've dealt with thousands of them and I've never once been bothered by one if it's in the water." It is on the land, however, where the trouble begins. Again, like so many Canadian humans, they appear to be completely oblivious to what is going on all around them -- political shifts for the warm-blooded, traffic patterns for the cold -- and show a stubborn determination to go their own way, no matter the consequences.
This, of course, proves far more deadly in crossing a road than it ever can in marking a ballot.
Scott Gillingwater was only five years old when he saw his first turtle struck by a vehicle. He insisted his parents stop the car and got out and rescued the turtle, despite the broken shell and blood. He took it home, nursed it all winter and, in the spring, released it back into the wild.
He was hooked, a self-confessed turtle nut who is now a recognized expert on their habitat and, too often, a voice crying in the wilderness when it comes to their future prospects.
Already six of Canada's eight native turtle species are listed as endangered, threatened or of special concern. Nothing worries a turtle lover more than development and, especially, more roads for the late-spring egg-layers to get across without getting squashed.
Another turtle lover, veterinarian Kristy Hiltz, runs the Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre in the lakes district northeast of Toronto and is on her cellular phone as she ferries two newly injured snappers to her clinic.
"The next two weeks," she says, "are going to be no sleep for me." The trauma centre grew out of a school project called "Kids for Turtles" that raised $5,000 to put up cautionary road signs such as the ones for fur-covered animals. Hiltz's own children were involved and got her interested in saving turtles to the point where she now says, "The situation is dire." Like Gillingwater, she is convinced that all of Canada's turtles are headed for the endangered list. As for the snapping turtles, with a lifespan that can reach 80 to 100 years and with egg production continuing throughout that life, the repercussions of the current highway carnage may not be realized for decades.
"These are not creatures to be taken for granted," she says. "We now think that road mortality is the leading cause of turtle death.
"But all they're doing is something their species has been doing for 300 million years.
"So, please, just let them do what they need to do."