Jersey bids farewell to Crush the loggerhead turtle

Crush the loggerhead turtle has been recovering at New Era Veterinary Hospital after being washed up by Storm Goretti, but is now strong enough to be moved to the UK.

The turtle will be joining Weymouth Sealife Centre, where she will stay until the paperwork is completed for her to be returned to the wild near Spain or Portugal in the spring.

Jersey's very poorly visitor was washed up cold-stunned during the 9 January storm with a body temperature of just 10 °C.

However, after a few days, the team at New Era managed to slowly warm her back up to around 20°C.

Vet Peter Haworth says, within weeks, she has turned from a 'dead-looking' turtle to now being off all treatment.

"She's now swimming around a tank very happily, eating everything that's put in front of her, doing what turtles do - which is pooing and weeing - and currently trying to bite everything in the tank.

"She had quite a lot of medication to start with, antibiotics, fluids, glucose.

"We ran some blood tests, did X-Rays and CT [scans], which didn't show too many issues."

Crush's recovery process has been a group effort, with people coming together to help the veterinary hospital with her care.

Jersey Oyster Company has helped with donating litres upon litres of unfiltered saltwater, which goes in Crush's tank.

Peter says the turtle has generated a huge amount of interest:

"Vets as a whole are doing their best to do what's right for the animals.

"Obviously, this isn't a fee-paying animal, and this is just an example that if we have the chance and we are able to do things to get animals better, that is inherently what we want to do."

Crush's journey to Southampton has been assisted by Loganair.

In his 27 years as a vet, Peter has only treated two turtles and says the team has limited experience with the species, but they have all learned a lot during Crush's stay with them.

He says turtles washing up in stormy weather is becoming a more regular occurrence around the UK and the Channel Islands.

"We've had a few turtles here wash up, which unfortunately were deceased, and we had Barnacle Bill in Guernsey, so we have had turtles over the years, but it does seem like this is becoming increasingly common.

"There is possibly up to 10 turtles alive at different sealife centres in the UK that are being brought back to health."

When asked about the increase in turtles being washed up and whether a Turtle Recovery Strategy would be helpful, Peter says it would be a great thing, but due to Brexit, it would be very difficult.

"It's never going to be the scenario that we could release them from Jersey, we would have to somehow implement a way to get them further down to France, which is actually quite difficult because Brexit has made the export of animals like that quite challenging, so a strategy would be a great idea, but it's a lot of time, money and effort that may come to nothing."