Frank Iero’s Baby Turtle Rescue Featured on Viral Animal Page

My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero became a dad during the recent pandemic downtime, but not in the way you think. Iero and his family managed to rescue a group of unborn turtles from an act of nature and helped them reach birth before returning them to the wild.

Iero recounted his story for The Dodo on their Twitter account, complete with a video accounting of the journey from the discovery through birth and their eventual acclimation back into the wild.

"My wife came over to me and said there's a giant turtle in our backyard," the guitarist recalls of their initial discovery. "She was kind of like rocking back and forth and started to wiggle her butt into the mulch. My kids affectionately named her Snippy."

The guitarist says he didn't think much of it at the time, but after a heavy rainstorm caused some damage around his home, they discovered what Snippy had really done when crossing onto their property.

"We had a really heavy rain last night and I went out to assess how much damage there was going to be. All this debris came down and I saw these what appeared to be ping pong balls. Oh my god, Snippy left her eggs here," said Iero, adding, "It was like a Horton moment, you know," referencing the famous Dr. Seuss story.

The musician and his daughters really wanted to do their part to save the unborn turtles, so he started to research how to take care of them.

"Went on the Internet immediately, got some sand and a ceramic heat
lamp," explained the guitarist. "We kept them to the side and just checked on them everyday. With the amount of trauma of having the nest washed out, I really didn't have too much faith that anything was going to hatch. Then, three weeks to a month later, my daughter went out and saw this little face sticking out of the sand."

Seeing the birth of the creatures left the musician in awe. "Watching them crack through that shell, using their arms and that little beak to kind of like, come through, that was unreal," he stated.

Iero says he learned that the turtles were born with a sac that took care of their nursing upon birth, but was advised by a reptile sanctuary that they needed to be taken to their natural environment soon so they could adapt. So he loaded them in a flower pot and took them to the nearby pond.

"To witness that instinct kick in, that they had gotten to where they finally belonged and they knew exactly where to go and how to do it... to have a little bit of a hand in helping nature along, it's amazing," explained the guitarist.

Watch Frank Iero's turtle story in full play out in the video below.

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