The Loneliness of Animals
I don’t think I know what it feels like I
know I don’t to drag one’s self so
slowly “like a zombie” down a cracked
hard, rock-cut creek bed in Illinois
to be lifted still churning one’s legs
to be the subject of such testing:
to be found to be Macrochelys
temminckii from one’s own fine blood-
line, by DNA of the genus
Chelydra a la Coenraad Jacob
Temminck “native to a region that
makes up the northernmost end of the
species’ range”: and now a real shock to
biologist Chris Phillips, who’d been
diving hoping to find he said one
“male alligator snapping turtle
with a transmitter on its back,” last
one precisely he’d previously
released in the area with hopes
“of spurring population growth”:
not this female at 22 pounds
“way bigger than expected,” spring-like
neck dorsal ridges “like some plated
dinosaur” so he held her Ethan
Kessler grad student just so as he
was taught for the photo hand behind
her head hand to the side along her
shell-back: ginger not to lose a thumb
to her steel-trap jaws “the turtle’s mouth
is camouflaged, and it possesses
a vermiform (i.e., ‘worm-shaped’) ap-
pendage at the tip of its tongue
to lure fish” by imitating movements
of a worm, “drawing prey to the mouth”;
adds Wikipedia and they do
not make particularly good pets:
so when they “reintroduced” her back
into the wild: by which, I think, they
mean dredged rivers drained swamps small wood-runs
culverts check dams and irrigation-
crop-circle-exurbs her battery-
transmitter died immediately:
and “finding her in the waters’ depths
again might take 30 years.” Let’s hope so.
