I’ve always been intrigued with the way animals occasionally take center stage in this city. As a reporter at the New York Sun, I sought these stories out. I wrote about the coyote that loped into Central Park from upstate. He was followed by a small army of Parks Department officers, cops, and photographers as he sprinted through the meadows, around the reservoir, and finally into a corner, where a sharpshooter hit him with a tranquilizer dart. There were also the animal crimes (I was a police reporter). One ex-con threw his cat out the window after she wandered into a room that was “off limits.” The projectile cat nearly struck a passerby, who called the ASPCA. The perpetrator was sent back to prison. Then there was the TV actor who murdered his girlfriend’s cat during a drunken rage. He, too, spent some time in jail. But none of these stories caught my attention as intensely and serendipitously as the painted turtles floating in the East River.

I first encountered them on a walk back to the Sun’s downtown office from the Lower East Side, where I was interviewing people for a story about Essex Market. I had decided to walk along the East River promenade for a spell. I like the stretch between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. You can find fishermen reeling in tiny crabs and porgy. The mythic bridges loom in the background, and you can see the edges of three boroughs. I was strolling along when I saw an old Chinese-looking woman with paint-stained fingers leaning on a guardrail. She was waving at something in the water and speaking in what I thought to be Mandarin. I leaned over the edge and saw a turtle floating. The armor of his shell was covered with a red inscription. “This lady is crazy,” I thought. I politely tried to ask her what she was doing, but she stared straight through me and continued speaking to the turtle. A nearby fisherman told me mysteriously, “It religion,” before going back to fixing a hunk of dead fish onto a hook for bait.

The turtle wasn’t doing well. There was no beach or place for it to rest, so it was hopelessly treading water. On a closer look, I saw that the design on the turtle’s back was a swastika, which seemed to cement the idea that she was clinically insane, and I decided to keep walking. But not five minutes later I came across two more old Chinese women. I watched as one of them picked up a turtle, also crudely painted, looked at it straight in the eyes and spoke directly to it. She placed the turtle down and tried to convince it to walk off the edge. When that didn’t work, she gave it a little push and it dropped five feet below and made a deep plunking noise. Again, I inquired, but the women ignored me. Deadline was fast approaching so I headed back to the office.

After filing the article on the market, the first thing I did was type into Google these words: “turtle,” “red paint,” and “East river.” A single Youtube video of three turtles covered in red paint in a bathtub came up. In the comments section someone had criticized the video’s creator for poisoning the turtles. “u should never put paint on ur turtles shell..it’s harmful to them,” the person wrote. The video’s creator, clearly an animal lover, responded in a follow-up post that he wasn’t responsible for the paint. He had found them in the East River.

I wrote the video owner an e-mail, asking for details, and he wrote back within minutes, saying that he had found them in the East River. The characters were Chinese and related to Buddhism, but he wasn’t sure how. I finally had a lead, so I contacted a professor at Columbia University, Chun-fang Yu, who was listed as an expert on Chinese Buddhism. The mystery began to clear up.

The practice is called fangsheng, meaning “release of life.” It dates back to Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty, a Buddhist icon who was known for building universities and making a decree that animals should not be killed. There are special ponds where Buddhists can come to release turtles in China. The ritual increases a Buddhist’s merit, which translates into a better reincarnation. It turns out that the day I was strolling along the river, August 1st, was the 19th day of the sixth month in the lunar calendar. On that day hundreds of years ago, Princess Miaoshan, the human manifestation of the Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin, left home to begin practicing religion, according to Buddhist texts. The symbols on the back, including the “svasti” co-opted by the Nazi party in the 20th century, say “all,” and “release of life.” Prof Yu told me that in Asian countries with Buddhist populations, there was a movement to stop the practice altogether because it wasn’t good for the environment.

A resident monk at the Grace Gratitude Buddhist Temple in Chinatown, Ben Kong, said he, too, had tried to convince the old-timers to stop fangsheng.

“It’s a sad situation,” he said. “They don’t know what they are doing.” The temple had tried an information campaign to educate Buddhists, coining a new word, fangsi, which means “release of death,” to get the point across. “The main thing is that we don’t have something of value to replace it with,” he told me. One idea they were mulling was helping organize donations to nature conservancy organizations on Buddhist holidays.

With the basic facts in place, I convinced the editors to run a small piece. I sprinted back to the river with a photographer, but the women were already gone. We managed to get a single shot of a painted turtle barely afloat. Of the dozen in the water earlier, this was the only one left. The rest had either drowned or floated further up the river. We ran a photo and a very short story the next day.

But I wasn’t satisfied with the story. I called around to herpetologists, and ended up speaking with the head of rehabilitation and education at the New York Turtle and Tortoise Society, Lorri Kramer. She said she was familiar with the practice and had tried to interest the Department of Environmental Conservation in doing something, but didn’t get a response. The turtles, she said, were red-eared sliders, a species native to the humid river environments of Louisiana and Alabama. Turtles there are bred in giant farms and shipped all around the country to become pets. They can’t survive in the brackish waters surrounding Manhattan.

Lorri laid out this picture: In Chinatown, there are two philosophies when it comes to turtles. One side makes them into a soup that is ladled into the bowls of the very young and the elderly in the hopes of lengthening their lives. The other group, mostly Buddhists, feels that turtles should be set free. They go to the bustling fish markets and buy up the reptiles, sometimes by the dozen, and release them in the river.

But even she was missing the final link: Neal Siegel, the creator of the video with the turtles in the bathtub. We met one Saturday afternoon on the same stretch of the East River promenade where I had first spotted the old Chinese women. Neal, who was 50 and in between jobs, said that he took a walk along the river each day to keep an eye out for the turtles. With his pink shirt, binoculars and floppy sun hat with a metal gecko attached to the front, he looked like a Florida beach explorer. He was accompanied by his girlfriend, Charme Chen, 29, a plump Taiwanese singer who Neal had met on an internet forum about stereos. He’d rescue the turtles and she’d give them names like “Sugar Free” and “Sailor Moon.”

The first time Neal saw the turtles had been a few years back when, like me, he came across a group of old Chinese women tossing turtles over the edge. He had seen a much bigger ceremony though, with about a hundred turtles brought to the river in a burlap bag and thrown in one-by-one. He managed to save about eight that day and had saved a few nearly every week ever since. (Turtles weren’t the only thing he found in the river. Once he came across several submachine guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, which he turned over to the police.)

As we were walking, Neal would stop occasionally and scan the water with his binoculars. “There’s one!” he said right in the middle of a sentence, and leapt over the guardrail onto a little rocky beach area. He brought back a small red-eared slider with a badly damaged shell. The edges were raw and bleeding. “This is no place for a turtle,” he said, as tourists swarmed him and started taking pictures.

He and Charme brought each turtle back to their small apartment on the Lower East Side, where they would clean off their shells, feed them, and hope that the damage wasn’t too severe. Some would die, but many would live. The problem was what to do with them.

One day, Neal, a life-long New Yorker, had a thought: “What about the Turtle Pond?” Ever since he has taken most of the rehabilitated turtles to the Central Park Turtle Pond, near the Delacorte Theater. The water is only accessible by a little dock that goes out about 30 ft. over the pond. On a warm day, you can go there and see hundreds of turtles swirling around the green pond water near the dock as visitors throw pieces of bread to them. When I visited one afternoon, a turtle caught my eye. Its shell had traces of red paint, and I could make out the outlines of a svasti. The problem didn’t quite end there. The gardener in charge of the pond, Maria Hernandez, told me that red-eared sliders had over-run the pond to the point where native species like Eastern Mud turtles were having trouble maintaining their numbers. “They are basically a problem because there is so many of them,” she said. Still, for Neal, it was the only option.

Standing on the dock, the whole journey seemed to unfurl before me. The little creatures were bred by the thousands in swamp-like farms along the tributaries leading into the Mississippi River, transported by plane and truck to the markets of Chinatown, carried in burlap bags, thrown into the perilously salty East River, rescued and rehabilitated in a Lower East Side bathtub, and then finally dropped into a murky pond in the biggest park in the densest city in America. They were New Yorkers.

Copyright 2008 Last Exit