Scuba Diving club,
Southern California
Sea Sabres
N.Y. loft as a
refuge for turtles
By Christine Haughney
THE WASHINGTON POST
Wildlife rehabilitator keeping endangered turtles
from death
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
|
To Market, To Market Herpetologists refer to it as the Asian
turtle crisis: To satisfy humans' demand for meat, shells, and medicine, some
10 million turtles are plucked from the region's wild areas every year. These
are among the species whose numbers are dropping. Golden Coin Turtle NATIVE TO: China, Vietnam, Laos, and
Hong Kong STATUS: Population down 80 percent from
historical numbers THREATENED BY: Belief that it can cure
cancer NOTEWORTHY: A single turtle now sells
for $1,000. Yangtze Giant Softshell Turtle NATIVE TO: China, Vietnam STATUS: Only a handful remain, most in
captivity. THREATENED BY: The food trade; the
species is a top choice for turtle soup. NOTEWORTHY: One remaining member of the
species lives in an extremely polluted lake in downtown Hanoi. Spiny Turtle NATIVE TO: Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand STATUS: Trade has declined by 50
percent in Indonesia due to a depleted population. THREATENED BY: The pet and food trades NOTEWORTHY: Young spiny turtles are
sold as pets; the drab older ones are sold as food. -- M.B. |
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.”
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Posted September 16, 2003