"I walk slowly. Our land is very steep, and my legs are short. I scan the ground, listening for birds in the treetops. It's April 19, and I move as if directed by an unseen hand to the winter hibernaculum of my first box turtle of spring. He sits like a jewel box in the leaves, only his head protruding, his eyes still sealed shut with the sleep of months. The sun bakes him as he basks. Behind him, a shallow burrow twice his length and just his width descends into the soft forest loam. He has spent the long winter here, barely kept from freezing solid by the insulating soil and leaves.

"Feeling the vibration of my footsteps, he lifts his front foot and wipes at his left eye. Slowly it opens, and the scarlet iris, filmy with sleep, fixes on my face. What a wake-up call, I think. The first day out of hibernation and the first thing he sees is a human being! I help him open his right eye and gently lift him to assess his condition. He's weighty for his size, and he's come through the winter well. He's missing his right hind foot, perhaps courtesy of a raccoon. It has healed well, and the bone ends in a pearly knob he walks on. I feel the concave surface of his lower shell. This, and his red eyes, assure me of his sex; the female's eyes would be brown to red-brown, her plastron flatter. His plastron needs a scoop in it so he can balance atop the female for mating. I return him to the mouth of his burrow . . ."

"Focused as I am on helping turtles in my little corner of Ohio, it's hard for me to comprehend what has been happening to box turtles on a nationwide basis. Most of us are accustomed to seeing them along our roads and highways, but box turtles are sold for as much as $100 apiece on the European pet market. When overcollecting and habitat loss pushed the Mediterranean tortoise near extinction, European and Japanese pet collectors turned to both legal and illegal imports of American box turtles to satisfy their craving for reptiles.

"Some twenty thousand box turtles per year were exported from this country in 1992 and 1993, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Outcry from herpetologists, conservationists, and concerned citizens led in 1994 to all North American turtles of the genus Terrapene being listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Further, the Fish and Wildlife Service set a zero quota for 1996, 1997, and 1998 for international exports from Louisiana, the only state that, in the face of public protest, persisted in shipping crateloads of box turtles abroad.

"Exports in the tens of thousands, even for only a few years, may have already doomed some native box turtle populations to extinction. One study of a subspecies in Wisconsin showed that the loss of only one adult turtle per year could bring that population to extinction in the distant future. With continuing encroachment on their remaining habitat, the toll taken by vehicles, predation, disease, and pet collection may already have put many box turtle populations on the road to extirpation.

"Professor William Belzer of Clarion University believes that thinning a box turtle population can lead to such low density that the animals can no longer reproduce, since their only means of detecting a potential mate is simply to run into it. They've got no call, no pheromone, no means of broadcasting their presence and thus attracting each other. Even when mates do connect and fertile eggs are laid, a legion of predators waits to devour them. In twelve years of searching for nests on our preserve, I have yet to find one before the skunks, raccoons, and crows do. The curled white eggshells litter the ground around the dug-out nests, signaling another failure. It can be hard to tell, with such long-lived animals, when a population has passed the point of no return — that is, when its replacement rate is outstripped by mortality. Although I'm out a lot looking for turtles, I've found only three juveniles in scores of encounters here — and one spent the summer with me recovering from a massive ear infection!

"I have the study abstracts before me on a table, and I struggle to make sense of them, to reconcile humanity's appalling treatment of this ancient creature with common sense and prudence. For me, it all comes down to a simple issue: respect. Respect, distinct from love, for we can love a species to death. With the international pet trade, we may already have done so. Something in me chills at the thought of keeping a box turtle for a pet, of putting a creature that may be as old as my mother in a cardboard box and, for the pleasure of having it, ending its reproductive life in the wild.

"I watch a video of box turtle courtship sent to me by Professor Belzer, a man possessed by box turtles and perhaps their most passionate defender. He's attempting to repatriate the forested grounds of a Pennsylvania nature center with displaced box turtles, and he videotapes their social interactions. Red eyes blazing, a male turtle approaches a female. He peers into her closed shell, then bobs his head rapidly and sways on extended legs in a fertility dance as old as carbon. It's his one-turtle campaign to keep the woodlands crawling with box turtles. I wish him, Bill Belzer, and all those who work to help box turtles the best of luck."