Book Club: Orion Nature Books, Vol. l, No.3, December, 1971.

"Consider the turtle," urged Henry David Thoreau in a journal entry dated August. 28,1856, and then proceeded to do so. "Perchance you have worried, despaired of the world, mediated the end of life, and all things seem rushing to destruction; but nature has steadily and serenely advanced with the turtle's pace... while (the turtle) rests warily on the edge of its hole, rash schemes are undertaken by men and fall. French empires rise and fall, but the turtle has developed only so fast. One turtle knows several Napoleons."

Those weren't precisely the thoughts that occurred to me when I came on Thoreau's exhortations in Jack Rudloe's "Time of the Turtle..." In fact, what I thought of was the first turtle I ever owned, which, in what was probably my earliest attempt at wit, I named New York World's Fair-- 1939 after the legend that had been painted on its back beside the trylon and perisphere, as those confident days when technology still prevailed over the rights of dumb creatures like my turtle.

Still the more one considers the turtle, the closer one gets to a basic but forgotten wonder of childhood-- those silly groping legs belying the great compactness of the shell and plastron (beguiling word!). This may be why the idea of a whole book on turtles seems silly at first, and entirely fitting on second thought. For sure surely we have all considered turtles at length and understand why the turtle figures so prominently in the myths of primitive peoples..

Mr. Rudloe loves turtles, too, but instead of effervescing he gives us scenes- in which he and a dentist friend struggle to remove the barnacles from inside a giant loggerhead's mouth, to study their adhesive properties for possible use in dentistry: "His pale yellow plastron swelled with air. He exhaled again, and again we held our breaths. To keep from being nauseated. What a monster he was."

What is appealing about "Time of the Turtle" is that Mr. Rudloe conveys enthusiasm by doing-- by admonishing the sullen fishermen of Panacea, Florida in the act of slaughtering a leatherback who had gotten entangled in their crab traps." .. And it is the vividness of these scenes that makes it such a pleasure to absorb the vast amount of turtle lore that Mr. Rudloe manages to convey in the process of depicting them.

In a particularly entertaining episode, Mr. Rudloe suffers a run of bad luck after capturing several hundred little diamond back terrapins. Half accepting a belief among the local fisherman that the "wind turtles" have the power to bring ill fortune, he traces the myth back to a time when the Indians of the region held the diamondback sacred, and leaves the matter at that.

Mr. Rudloe is a confessed sentimentalist about the ultimate value of the sea turtle's survival in the face of threatened extinction. Challenged by a "So what?" Mr. Rudloe feels impotent hauling out "the tired old arguments and devices that desperate biologists use when they're trying to argue for the survival of any species." After all, "Logically I knew extinction was a natural process. Something 95 percent of all the species that had ever lived on this planet had become extinct."

So he resorts to another tactic. He writes a book that makes sea turtles so appealing that we would simply miss them if they were to become extinct. "Time of the Turtle is of course that book."

"This is a provocative work in which Jack Rudloe considers some of the more difficult questions bearing on man's treatment of wild animals and the nature of the concept of endangerment. Mr. Rudloe juxtaposes the behavior of sea turtles-- hawksbills, greens, leatherbacks, riddles and loggerheads-- with that of humans. The efforts of a group of graduate students to fend off marauding raccoons and opportunistic ghost crabs in an attempt to protect turtle eggs on a South Carolina beach seems selfless. Other people, whose attitude toward sea turtles is sharply commercial, are less admirable. In one of the most moving scenes in the book, Mr. Rudloe confronts a group of Florida panhandle fishermen who are crassly butchering a 700 pound leatherback turtle-- an endangered species. Mr. Rudloe rescues the animal's heart and returns it respectfully to the Gulf waters, and then ponders why he didn't turn the fishermen in for committing a Federal crime.

"There are other, similarly jarring scenes here, for this seems a deliberately human book, as perhaps it should be; human beings, notes the author, and their predilection for biological information, turtle soup, tortoise-shell combs, financial solvency and zoo exhibition have a profound effect on the ecology to turtles. To wit: the anomaly of starving children in Haiti being fed by a Baptist missionary from proceeds of the sale of endangered hawksbill turtles. Or the almost existential horror of turtle hatchlings heading away from the sea towards brightly lit motel parking lots in instinctual confusion, there to be run over.

"While the book ends at a point that seems arbitrary... he nevertheless evokes these mysterious creatures well and makes us consider their plight.

"This book is much more than a string of well written anecdotes. Scientific facts and observations have been carefully blended into each tale so that the reader, whether novice or trained biologist, will finish with a sound background in sea turtle biology. Of course, the book is not meant to be read as an educational experience, but for pleasure. And pleasure it gives! This book is in the class with "A Sand County Almanac". Read it and share with Rudloe his exhilarating encounters with sea turtles, their biology, and their myths."