By Sara Steffen | Conservation Coordinator
As we reported in December, we have been working to create a Box Turtle Neighborhood Watch. Well, thanks to your support, we are excited to announce that the Box Turtle Neighborhood Watch is now LIVE!. This project aims to study box turtles in urban and suburban areas. At this time, even if you’re in a rural area, you can help!
Currently, the Box Turtle Connection is focused on studying turtles in forested areas – mainly state forests and parks. As part of this project, Piedmont Wildlife Center has been focused on collecting a population census on box turtles in Leigh Farm Park in Durham. What we have discovered is that we have a fairly large population of box turtles with about 80 acres of forested land. This is a good thing; however, this doesn’t give us the real information we need to determine how box turtles are doing throughout North Carolina. They may be thriving in areas like Leigh Farm Park, but what about in your neighborhood? What about a recently developed business park or shopping center? Although eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina carolina) are protected in neighboring states, they have no protection in North Carolina. It is still legal to take these wild animals and make them pets or even eat them! We need more data in order to raise awareness and protect box turtles, which is how the Box Turtle Neighborhood Watch was created. This is where we need your help!
We need citizens, like you, to get involved not only with taking more photos of turtles, but also by recruiting your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, or anyone you can think of to join the project! We have received data on a few turtles over multiple years, but these photos are few and far between. One photo of a turtle isn’t enough to tell us whether or not the turtle survived the following winter or whether it died because a road was built in its home. The only way to get more photos is to get more people looking for box turtles. Maybe the box turtle you saw last fall hibernated in your neighbor’s yard! Maybe the turtle crossed two streets and is in a neighboring subdivision. With more people documenting box turtles, our hope is that we can answer these questions.
So now, envision we have 500 box turtle photos to sort through. You can imagine how tedious it would be to go through photos o find matching turtles! Well, we are working on a solution to that problem. As we said in our December report, box turtles have a unique marking on their shell, similar to a fingerprint. We have teamed up with a non-profit, WildTrack, who is working on a photo ID app for box turtles. Our hope is that this turtle ID app will be able to recognize individual turtles without having interns and volunteers search through hundreds of photos. Zoe, one of our WildTrack friends is "very excited to be working on this local project to help identify individual box turtles but we need more photos to test our theory. The more photos we receive, the more data we have to plug into our database." As turtle season is upon us, you can get involved now to help! If you learn how to take photos, you can even add to our database of photos for Zoe to develop the app.
If you are interested in learning more about the neighborhood turtle watch, the photo identification app, or what it takes to become a neighborhood turtle watch leader, please let me know! Your level of involvement is up to you, but we will need a few leaders around the Triangle to help us gain enough publicity to gather the data needed to help save box turtles!
Your donations have helped us to print door hangers to educate citizens how to look for and photogrpah box turtles they find. Volunteers have been trained to teach citizens at neighborhood meetings but their is still work to be done. More door hangers and more volunteer trainings will help us spread the word to more neighborhoods, resulting in more photos and more data. Help eastern box turtles by making a donation on GlobalGiving Match Day, June 15th, and your donation will be matched by 50%!! That day, starting at 9:00 AM EST, a $50 donation will become $75, a $100 donation will become $150!!
Thanks so much for protecting eastern box turtles!!
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By Sara Steffen | Conservation Coordinator
By Sara Steffen | Conservation Coordinator
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