The Washington Post
July 5, 2003
N.Y. loft as a refuge for turtles
Wildlife rehabilitator keeping endangered turtles from death
By Christine Haughney
THE WASHINGTON POST
NEW YORK, July 5 — It’s the well-mastered art of cramped New York living, exploiting every nook and cranny to accommodate the pets. Closets become cat bedrooms. Tar roofs are turned into dog runs. And studios are made to accommodate steer-size Great Danes.
THEN THERE’S Richard Ogust and his sprawling Tribeca loft, which is filled with 1,000 swimming, spinning turtles.
Ogust stood there last week in Army-green shorts and a torn white T-shirt in the 3,500-square-foot space, amid dozens of purple dishpans and clear plastic storage bins filled with endangered turtles. He takes a walking tour, down aisles of tanks filled with Roti Island snake-necked turtles (they live on but one island in Indonesia — and in his loft) and Chinese turtles. The tanks gurgle, flies buzz and an occasional clunk-clunk resounds when Kund and Ond, two terrier-sized Burmese Mountain turtles, knock their shells against the walls.
The entire loft smells a bit ... fishy.
“If we stand here quietly, they’ll start pulling their necks out,” Ogust said as he waited for a few of his turtles to display their elongated necks and tiny heads. “In the next 10 or 20 years, many of these animals could be extinct.”
Ogust, 50, is a writer and — for the last five years — a New York State licensed wildlife rehabilitator. His loft holds one of the nation’s largest private collections of endangered turtles, while he sleeps in the apartment below. Some come from John F. Kennedy International Airport, where Customs agents snatch them. Some are purchased through middlemen in Asian markets. And some are rescued from the fish tanks of Chinatown, before they are rendered into soup.
SAVING THE TURTLES
His reputation spans the nation. When Customs agents seize a collection of turtles in Miami, New York or Los Angeles, Ogust is on the short list of people they call. When the turtles arrive, Ogust quarantines them and arranges for expert medical advice.
“We have turtles here that are presumed to be extinct in the wild,” Ogust said.
Two-thirds of the world’s remaining freshwater turtles and tortoises are threatened, according to the Washington-based Turtle Conservation Fund. Their popularity in Asia, where they are prized for culinary and medicinal purposes, continues to grow, said Rick Hudson, a conservation biologist at the Fort Worth Zoo and co-chairman of the Turtle Survival Alliance. The Turtle Conservation Fund’s list of the “Top 25 Turtles on Death Row” includes several species that could become extinct within the next 20 years.
Freshwater turtles belong to some of the world’s oldest amphibious species. “They are like living fossils,” Hudson said. “They survived ancient dinosaurs, and we’ve just entered the 21st century and we’re about to lose them.”
Zoos have helped preserve them, but most don’t have the room, money or expertise to protect the endangered amphibians. Even the Bronx Zoo has entrusted endangered turtles to Ogust’s care.
“We have limited amounts of space, and he will be able to provide them with greater space and more attention,” said John Behler, the curator at the Bronx Zoo’s Department of Herpetology, which handles reptiles and amphibians.
AN ACQUIRED PASSION
Ogust did not have a lifelong love affair with the turtle. When he was little he had one pet turtle, named Lickety Split, along with a beagle and a Lhasa apso. He grew up in midtown Manhattan behind the counter of his parents’ Manhattan clothing and textile boutique. He studied literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara and devoted his career to writing long-form prose that appeared in art galleries with names such as IBHR-5.
He spotted the first member of his collection a decade ago, during dinner at Bingo’s, an all-you-can-eat Chinatown buffet. She was a diamond-backed terrapin with fat, flat “hands” and black-and-white speckled flesh, and she was anxiously sharing a tank with what Ogust took to be a half-dozen eels. After a sleepless night, Ogust returned to the restaurant and paid $20 to rescue her.
“It was totally out of the blue. I was a writer leading my life,” he said as he watched the same turtle wade happily at the top of her tank. He says her name is too silly to say. “She’s beautiful.”
For five years, Ogust methodically built up his collection and became a certified wildlife rehabilitator. A meeting of the New York Turtle and Tortoise Society in 1998 led him to increase his collection tenfold. There he saw a video of the markets in China that hawk turtles so endangered they could disappear within two to three years. After that meeting, Ogust started accepting turtles in groups of, say, 24 or 32.
“My purpose changed,” he said. “I was actively acquiring animals I realized were threatened.”
It’s not an easy life. When Ogust turned his bachelor pad into a turtle rehabilitation center, he hired three full-time workers to help with the care and feeding and to nurse the sickest. Private donors and foundation grants help with the costs — including the $3,000 to $4,000 a month he spends on food and supplies and the $8,000 a year for veterinary care.
The turtles often arrive in his loft deathly ill — infected with parasites or bacteria, or with their stomachs packed with sand to boost their market weight. Many are fearful. Some never recover. Not long ago, a brown-shelled Malayan box turtle that had survived in the wild for 30 years perished.
“I went to clean his water yesterday, and he was dead,” Ogust’s assistant Laura Mosiello said as she began to weep. “It comes to this: He dies in a plastic bucket in New York City.”
She brightened when talk turned to the other turtles, not least those who have proved able urbanites, such as Kund and Ond: “You see them lying on the ground. Their legs are splayed out. They’ve got greens in their mouth. I think I could learn from their own lives.”
DRAWBACKS REMAIN
Ogust’s friends worry about how much time and money he spends on his collection.
Still, change is coming to his loft. Ogust’s paradise has the drawbacks of any Manhattan apartment: lack of space and sunlight. Some of his turtles are crawling their pen walls. This has led Ogust to search for more space for his collection.
In August, some of his amphibian turtles will take up residence at the Tewksbury Institute of Herpetology, in central New Jersey, a foundation Ogust helped found. His turtles will join turtles from seven other private collections and find something like amphibian heaven: fifty acres of ponds and mating mounds, with plenty of leisure time for wading, mating and the turtle good life. The foundation is near Rutgers University, which will use the center for research.
“It’s going to be great,” Ogust said. Then a cloud seemed to pass across his face, and he added: “I already went through the emotional pain of it.”
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
