"Squeeze" today. After 10 months of rehab he is able to use his legs again and is growing.
This little denizen of marshes, swamps, water carrying ditches, lake and pond edges and occasionally of backyard goldfish ponds ranges northward from Florida’s Key West to southern and central Georgia and extreme southeastern South Carolina. Adult Three-striped Mud Turtles, Kinosternon bauri, are normally 3 to 4 inches long, but may rarely reach 5 inches. Hatchlings are, as I describe them, about 17/25ths the size of a shiny new quarter. In other words, hatchlings are tiny. In fact, so tiny are they, and so close in color to the earthen nest from which they emerge, that unless they are moving it is very easy to step on and kill or debilitate a hatchling.

And that’s exactly what happened to “Squeeze”, a hatchling that had been brought, on the verge of death, crushed, with cattywampus legs, dehydrated, and misshapen, to Florida Wildlife Care. Eventually “Squeeze” wound up with us, and we began a restoration project that I felt sure would fail. It didn’t. But the resurrection took a long time—several months in fact, and on a small scale is still ongoing. It was only 3 weeks ago (Dec 2021) that Squeeze finally began using his (we of course have no idea whether it’s male or female) right front leg. Today, rather than swimming in circles he goes in a straight line—slowly but straight. And he has begun eating ravenously and has grown. Oh, his name? Patti called him that because his life had been so nearly squeezed out of him. But we now have hope, and I’m pretty sure that Squeeze does too. C’mon Squeeze!