I was walking in Cambridge along the River Cam 10 years ago with Jenny Andrew who noted that a mother duck she saw each day gliding down the venerable river was missing three of her original eight ducklings. My immediate response, based on the experience of growing up near creeks and ponds in North Carolina, was reflexive: The turtles got them, I said confidently.
Jenny, the wife of Chris Andrew, the noted Cold War expert and author of highly acclaimed books on the KGB, looked at me with a combination of doubt and surprise and informed me that there were no turtles in England. This shocking news was difficult to digest. It was as if we came from two different worlds despite the commonalities of language and culture. I entertained grandiose thoughts of introducing the turtle to Great Britain and gaining a knighthood. No turtles! It was as if the animal kingdom of the sceptred isle was missing a vital link in the natural order of things.
For us in the South, the turtle is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. In the 1950s dime stores sold baby turtles like hard candy. Any outdoor excursion included turtle sightings, including coming across giant snappers that could tear off the end of a broomstick in a heartbeat. We collected them, named them and knew there were plenty more if they escaped or met an untimely demise.
Turtles are prolific, plentiful, long-lived and the scourge of farmers and pond owners who see them gobble up ducklings and crowd aquatic life. And turtles are hardly an endangered species. In fact, they are more of a danger to other species. Yet activist environmentalists have embraced the turtle and elevated the lowly reptile to the status of poster child for saving the earth.
Granted, the adoration of turtles began with the sea turtles that lumber up on shore each year to lay their eggs. This Herculean task is much admired, and rightfully so, but it has led to restrictions on humans that test sanity. For example, at the ritzy Figure Eight Island resort across a small spit of water from Wrightsville Beach near Wilmington, residents are now required to change the outdoor lighting on their homes to provide a more conducive atmosphere for the turtle eggs to hatch.
But the mother of all asinine policies to protect turtles occurred just recently at the Pine Knoll Shores community at Atlantic Beach, near Morehead City, where dredging for a $12 million beach renourishment project turned up a fifth Kemps Ridley turtle. The little fellow was, according to reports, 25 centimeters and he was not killed. He was rushed to the Karen Beasley Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center at Topsail Island where he was being treated, according to the local newspaper. As he lay recovering, the little fellow had no idea he had set off a gigantic regulatory chain reaction two thousand miles long. A little background is necessary to explain why.
On the East Coast of the United States, beach dredging projects are scheduled between November and April to avoid turtle nesting season. Additionally, an endangered species observer is aboard the turtle trawler that, in the Atlantic Beach case, costs $150,000 extra. The Corps of Engineers allows only 35 Loggerheads, seven green and seven Kemps Ridley turtles to be dredged up from Maine to Florida in the process. When the Atlantic Beach dredgers turned up our little friend (although news reports said he was the fifth, not the seventh) it was curtains for all projects on the eastern seaboard at a cost of at least $100 million.
As a turtle man myself I have no grudge against the sluggish carapaces, but I do draw the line when creatures are elevated above the human species in the public policy scheme of things. The case of the teeny Kemps Ridley turtle shutting down multi-million dollar dredging operations is just the latest in an absurd series of events in which human habitation and welfare is held hostage to the proposition that animals come first, mankind second.
Notes from La-La Land:
Red Charles Meeker is behaving more like a commissar than mayor of Raleigh. And he must be reading Das Kapital every day. How else could he dare to propose to tax more expensive homes for trash pick-up on the doctrinaire assumption that the wealthy buy more and therefore create more trash? I'll tell you why. He is a Marxist to his very bones and he is waging class warfare in the capital city. Perhaps a purge trial will cause him to understand that communism lost and capitalism won the Cold War.
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Word is that the YMCA Indian Guide and Indian Princess programs are changing the organizations name to Y-Guides, to avoid hurting the ethnic pride of American Indians, who, it is heard, have no objection to the current label.
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While the states education establishment has been telling us that test scores are up, the new Bush legislation, No Child Left Behind, in reporting on schools in trouble, announced recently that in North Carolina, 75 percent of schools, 50 percent of teachers and 70 percent of teacher assistants do not meet the new minimum standard of achievement. Much more later in these pages.
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UNC-Chapel Hill has dropped its early admissions program due to fear that minority enrollment quotas may be jeopardized. During the same week it was revealed that the school has more black full-professors than any other public university in the nation.
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Dan Rather, interviewed on Britains BBC-TV, said that news was censored in the U.S. because Americans are too patriotic and don't want to hear the truth about the war on terrorism. What we don't want to hear are the rantings of the obviously unstable Dan Rather.
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We live in two different worlds: The U.S. Senate and the United States of America, which is the only explanation for the Senate voting to forbid oil exploration in Alaska in the midst of total war in the oil-laden Mideast.