Vet reunited with turtle he rescued in Vietnam

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

Jim Lowery was standing in a stream in Vietnam when he saw a little turtle about the size of a golf ball swim by. He said he just had to scoop her up.

Lowery was in the Navy during the Vietnam War, with a task of collecting mosquitoes and animals to determine whether malaria and other diseases were present.

Most of the animals were euthanized, but Lowery had another idea for the Vietnamese pond turtle: sending it to the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium.

“I wanted to keep [her]alive and send her back here,” he said.

So he did, in 1966. Later named Ba Cu, the turtle was the only one of her species in the U.S. at the time, according to zoo officials.

The Vietnamese pond turtle is now 14th on the list of endangered turtles and tortoises, said Saul Bauer, reptile-keeper at the zoo. How many are left, in the wild or in zoos, hasn’t been determined.

But he felt confident in saying that, at 50, Ba Cu is the oldest living turtle of her species on record. Normally, Vietnamese pond turtles live about 25 years.

On Thursday, Lowery and Ba Cu met again in a visit arranged by zoo officials in honor of Memorial Day. Though Lowery, now 72, lives in Pickerington, he doesn’t often visit the zoo, he said, so he was glad to see the turtle.

“She sets a record every day,” he said.

Before he was drafted, Lowery had been studying to be a zookeeper and worked at the zoo’s reptile house.

In addition to the turtle, he sent back snakes and small mammals that he thought the zoo would be interested in. First, he had to persuade Vietnamese wildlife officials to let him take the animals, then he boxed them up and sent them to the U.S. on Pan American World Airways.

After he got out of the Navy, Lowery worked for the Columbus Zoo and the Birmingham Zoo before enlisting in the Army.