When they get off work, a handful of zookeepers and volunteers from the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo load into a van and head north on Interstate 69.

They’re on an unpaid mission, to save turtles.

The Gulf oil spill is still news, but outside of Michigan, a leaking oil pipeline that dumped more than 800,000 gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River has been all but forgotten.

The aftermath of that spill, which left a sheen of oil along 30 miles of the river, has left hundreds of creatures – birds, mammals and reptiles – coated in thick crude and in danger of dying.

One of those responding to the call to rescue turtles is the Fort Wayne zoo’s veterinarian, Joe Smith.

Smith travels to Michigan once a week, a schedule he established for himself to keep from getting burned out. Other zoo volunteers travel to Michigan after work as often as twice a week, toiling over oil-soaked turtles from about 5:30 to 9 p.m. before coming home for the night.

It’s exhausting work, Smith said. It isn’t physically strenuous. It’s just tedious and overwhelming. Each turtle brought in has to be given a medical evaluation, cleaned and fed a special solution of vegetable oil, mayonnaise and drugs to give it some nutrition and flush out any oil that it may have ingested.

The cleaners have it even worse, Smith said. The oil is more like tar, and it has to be meticulously removed using gauze, Q-tips and Dawn dish detergent.

“Some nights they will clean only one turtle. They’re so oiled, and they have to get the oil out of all the little cracks and crevices,” Smith said.

Meanwhile, the turtles fight back. They don’t like having their legs and heads pulled out from their hiding places inside their shells to be cleaned.

“They’re given this tar-colored turtle and when they’re done it’s clean and you can see the colors,” Smith said. “It’s rewarding, but it’s frustrating. They spend four or five hours on one turtle and 79 others have come in.”

At any time, there are 300 turtles in the building where the rescue effort is taking place, and they have to be cleaned and fed and their water changed. Some will wait days before volunteers can get them.

In some cases, turtles that have only a little oil on them can be quickly relocated upstream from the spill, where they get a chance to start a new life.

Others suffering from wounds or that seem sick from ingesting oil or from lack of food take more time. Those turtles would probably not survive winter hibernation, so they will remain in the rescue building over the winter and released in the spring when they are stronger, Smith said.

The whole process may be frustratingly slow, but so far, volunteers from Fort Wayne and four other zoos in the region have rescued about 1,250 oil-covered turtles. Nobody knows how many dead turtles are lying at the bottom of the river.

A lot of people have no idea what Smith and other volunteers are doing in Michigan. Smith said he has had friends and family members ask him why they are bringing turtles to Michigan from the Gulf. That just shows how forgotten the oil spill on the Kalamazoo River is.

The job is getting easier, though. The weather is cooling, and turtles move less, so fewer and fewer are caught. In another month, Smith suspects, the number of turtles captured will drop to zero, and the rescue effort will stop until spring.

The rescue sounds like an expensive proposition, but Smith says he has no idea how much it’s costing. The owners of the oil pipeline sure are getting the deal of lifetime from the various zoo volunteers, who aren’t paid a penny.

I wonder whether anyone will thank them when they’re done.