The Wood Turtle is a very low-profile, crawling creature that spends most of its time near the waters of local rivers and streams. It also travels through forests and across grasslands but rarely winds up more than several hundred meters from flowing water. It prefers to use a shallow, sandy bottom to move from one pool to another.

            Many different predators threaten its well-being, including snapping turtles, racoons, otters, foxes, cats, ravens and coyotes, each of which gobbles up a nutritious meal upon capturing a Wood Turtle. As in my illustration, these predators also pose a threat, destroying turtle nests and eating baby turtles, which adds greatly to the endangerment of the entire population.

            The Wood Turtle itself is a totally omnivorous creature, feeding on a range of animals and plant matter, both in water and on land. It is attracted to a wide selection of insects, berries, beetles, Millipedes, slugs, fungi, mosses, grasses, and on occasion, it can be seen stomping the ground with alternating hits from both the left and right feet to cause moles and earthworms to rise to the surface where they become easy prey.

            The Wood Turtle is somehow exposed to many other municipal dangers, such as being run over by speeding cars while crossing a country road or hit by agricultural machinery. They are more often subject to illegal poaching to add a pet turtle to a serpentine collection for a young member of a local country family.

            To combat so many threats, Smithsonian scientists have been closely monitoring their dangerous movements since the year 2016 by attaching tracking devices that weigh less than 0.5 ounces. In the past year, no fewer than 38 turtles have been tracked in this way.

            Wood Turtles have subsequently been petitioned for, including under the Endangered Species Act, to be reviewed by the end of the year to make a final and official determination. So far, the species is listed under the Greatest Conservation Need by the Northeast Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies, Inc., which encompasses 13 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and six Canadian provinces.

            The turtles in these places qualify for help with a head-starting process where they are temporarily removed from the dangerous wild world with all the threats with the hope that their condition improves greatly when they are released.

            The most complete success of head-starting was in the past century when the American Buffalo was virtually brought back from extinction by head-starting it back into the wild.  Let’s hope that the Wood Turtle is not getting near that far gone so that it might not be brought back in the immediate future for us all to recognize a complete recovery.

By George B. Emmons

            Let me make this perfectly clear, I have nothing against Mickey Mouse.

            Everyone likes Mickey, who has always appeared to be a fine character, even though his boss is cheap and didn’t pay very well. Disney once sent me a bill for 36 cents, saying they had overpaid me for an illustration I created for them! After a year of receiving this bill every month and ignoring it, I finally put 36 pennies in an envelope and mailed them their money. That was the end of my working for the “Happiest Place on Earth.”

            Unfortunately, Mickey’s relatives in our neck of the woods are not as nice as old Mickey. They have cost me a pretty penny recently, and it is not the first time.

            Recently, driving down the highway, I turned my headlights on, as I usually do on a cloudy day, when suddenly my horn started blowing, the windshield washers started spraying, and the wipers began swiping back and forth. What the heck!? I turned the lights off and tried again. Same thing. I’m not one to swear, but a truck driver gave me a thumbs-up as he passed, hearing the nasty words that were spewing out of my mouth because I knew what the problem was. Off to my favorite garage.

            As I suspected, my mechanic said Mickey’s country-mice cousins, who reside in our garage during the winter, had overstayed their welcome and have appeared to have eaten the wiring in my dashboard, causing a short circuit, setting off the blowing, spraying and swiping. It is not the first time Mickey’s cousins have cost me money.

            After recovering my truck from three days in the shop, I have resumed my annual mouse hunt. I have enough mouse traps spread around the garage to trip up a bear, but the little devils just ignore them. I know because we set up a camera and watched them dancing around the traps. I bought one of those electronic thingies that claim to emit a sound that purports to hurt the critters’ ears and chases them away.

            Not!

            I have seen the little buggers gather around the device and enjoy the concert. I even tried a bucket of water with a ramp, hoping they’d take a swim. No luck. I have filled every hole I can find in the garage, but mice can squeeze through an opening the size of a dime.

            I have consulted every article on Google to find a solution. The best experts can suggest is spraying peppermint oil around the garage and the vehicles, which I have been doing religiously for months, purchasing gallons of the brew at great cost. Supposedly, the tiny monsters hate the smell. Apparently not.

            Some say the cause of this problem is that automakers use soy-based wiring in their vehicles. The little rodents apparently feast on soy. Others say this is a myth with which I tend to agree. They also attacked my wife’s new car, eating much of the wiring and all the foam padding under the back seat. That little feast cost my insurance company $2,000 and me another $500 to cover the deductible.

            I have avoided putting poison down because I don’t want to harm the cats and bunnies that visit the yard or to call an expensive exterminator. Maybe old Mickey Mouse, whom I have always spoken well of despite his boss’s stinginess, could encourage his rodent relatives to move to sunny Florida or at least send me 36 cents to begin replenishing my mice-control budget. Eh, probably not.

            Editor’s note: Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and retired newspaper columnist whose musings are, after some years, back in The Wanderer under the subtitle “Thoughts on ….” Morgado’s opinions have also appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.

Thoughts on…

By Dick Morgado

On July 1, the Benjamin Cushing Community Center in Marion was the venue for a first-of-its-kind event: a community reading of Frederick Douglass’ July 4, 1852, speech. The event was hosted by the Marion Art Center, Tri-Town Against Racism and the Marion Council on Aging.

            Before the community reading, keynote speaker Dr. Moise Saint-Louis, interim associate vice chancellor for Student Affairs and director of the Frederick Douglass Unity House, set the stage by giving the audience members context.

            Who was Frederick Douglass? How did his agency help to frame the Abolition Movement? But moreover, how did his very life, his work, his struggles help the world to comprehend the true horror of slavery during his lifetime to the present?

            Saint-Louis said, “His insistence that there should be no slave in a nation that claims all men were created equal, no three-fifths of a human being in a nation that professes the inalienable rights of all … his demand that the nation should live up to its creed and ideals, that, we, should live up to them, provide us with a historical framework for understanding every social movement, every call for justice and equity, and every struggle for rights and fairness in our nation’s history.”

            When Douglass gave his speech regarding Independence Day, he was not fully a free man. Although he had managed to escape his enslaver, finding some semblance of freedom in the north, he had to pay his former master, pay for the release of his very body from legalized bondage before he could breathe freely. Yet he still was not considered a whole human being.

            “The Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850,” Saint-Louis reminded the assembled. The result was a perpetuation of slavery. He spoke to Douglass’ first-hand knowledge of the crimes against humanity he witnessed and experienced as a slave. He reminded us of the cruelty wrought on people of color: rape, murder and total exploitation.

            Slaves represented an engine that fueled the American economy, and white slave owners were not giving that up easily. Keeping black people in a category of living beings that was not 100% human justified their imprisonment.

            After Saint-Louis ended his rousing speech, 15 members of the community, a group of volunteers from around the area, began reading Douglass’ speech. The group represented a wide swath of society, young, older, male, female, black, white. It was moving to witness young black men and women speaking the lines written by a hero of justice for all. It was unifying to see white, senior citizens nearly brought to tears as they spoke iconic lines of the former slave.

            The Douglass speech does not pull any punches.

            “The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! That gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.”

            Douglass implored his audience 171 years ago to “…look in the mirror.” Saint-Louis echoed that charge.

By Marilou Newell