Cuca

This is my pet box turtle. She's actually pretty fast for a turtle. She spends most of the day sleeping, eating, basking, or chilling by her pool, catching a contact high. I found her two years ago; she was unconscious in an Olympic sized pool on the grounds of a mansion I rented out for a few days in the Hamptons. She was about the size of a half dollar (now has about a four inch shell) and for the most part looked completely dead. I used a stick to pull her closer to the edge so that I could inspect her closer but the whole time she remained unconscious with all her limbs hanging outside the protection of her shell. I took her out of the water and after a quick look I decided to give it a wild chance and pressed my index finger, CPR style, into her plastron (bottom shell) and guess what, it worked. She sort or coughed and sneezed water and moved as much as her fatigued body would allow her and sort of just hung in a hypothermic exhausted stupor. I took her in dried off real quick, and wrapped her in a heated towel and left her near the heater for about a day. Slowly but surly, after a long rest she was out and always curious. Out of fear of her falling in a pool again or becoming lunch for an owl and of course after some research on the species (terrapene carolina carolina), I decided to take her home. We get along just fine. She seems to know that when I call her name it equals food because she sort of gallops towards me. She trusting enough to allow one to hand feed her so long as there aren’t any quick movements. She’s lives in a gigantic tank with real grass, mosses, ferns, and ivy; it is sort of like a little forest in that there. Sometimes when the herb is real good I like to sit and stare at her little world. Her favorite foods are live or freeze dried crickets, meal or earthworms, turtle pellets, cherry tomatoes and hard boiled eggs, shell included.