Help Save the Box Turtles!

Well, winter here in the piedmont has come to an end with spring right at our doorsteps. Flowers are blooming, pollen is in the air turning all we know and love yellow, and turtles are starting to awaken from their long dormant states. As I step outside the cabin with my gear, I hear the sounds of children playing mixed with the rhythmic clicks of our radio telemetry equipment. There I walk along the trails throughout the park as the clicks become louder and louder. Making my way through the brush of our forests, the radio tells me I’m getting closer. I trek over puddles and rivers as my boots become covered in mud. Finally, I come across an eastern box turtle! 

That feeling of excitement has become one of the many moments I’ve come to enjoy here as a Wildlife Conservation Intern. Previously, I had zero knowledge of these stoic creatures or their conservation efforts. Like many, I preferred to admire sea turtles. With their grace and beauty, how could they compare to the eastern box turtle? How wrong I was. Part of my duties here, aside from assisting in the Box Turtle Connection, is caring for the Ambassador Animals. Five box turtles reside here at the Piedmont Wildlife Center, and I’ve been able to observe the behaviors of each. Shelly in particular has stolen my heart. We spend time together as I enter data into our Turtle Trekkersspreadsheet, helping citizens all over the NC triangle contribute to our cause. Her sassy attitude has me laughing each time she creates a mess in her enclosure, and her intelligence has come to surprise me. Spending time with her has helped me grasp how important it is to protect them.

Why Box Turtles? To quote the great Jane Goodall,

“Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.” -Jane Goodall 

These individuals, I’ve learned, have been victim to habitat fragmentation and microclimate changes due to human interference. Roads are their enemy, and the exotic pet trade has made an unfortunate impact. Now more than ever it is important that we gain the support not only from those of us directly involved in the project, but from individuals all over. All individuals matter and have a role to play. The role of your support makes a difference in protecting these creatures I’ve come to know and love.

Join us for an upcoming virtual orientation on how to be a Turtle Trekker! This will be held on April 15^th from 1pm-2pm through Zoom. Link below on how to join.

Also, did you know that turtle’s shell segments are called scutes? Because I didn’t, and it is now my new favorite word.

Links:

• Turtle Trekkers Orientation
• Information on Turtle Trekkers Project

This probably goes without saying, but...it's been a year. One for the books. At Piedmont Wildlife Center, some things have changed; we've gone virtual for our Animal Encounter programs, and camps continue to operate under COVID-19 protocols. Some things have remained the same: our box turtle study is going stronger than ever, and the turtles in the park are blissfully unaware of any sort of chaos taking place in the world. 

As fall turns into winter and the turtles are heading into brumation (a fancy word for reptilian hibernation), we're hunkering down by the computer to do some data analysis. Thanks to folks who have submitted turtle photos through our citizen science project, Triangle Turtle Trekkers, and photos our Conservation Team has taken of turtles at Leigh Farm Park, we have a large set of photos to explore with FIT software, developed by our research partner, WildTrack.

Normally used for analyzing animal footprints, FIT has been specially modified for us to use for analyzing box turtle shells. The software is designed to perform hundreds of measurements with each shell photo, and groups photos together by similarity. The goal of FIT is to see how well the software can identify individual turtles from photographs of the shell. 

We've perfomed FIT on all of our resident turtles at PWC, and the software grouped them correctly with no problem. This time around, we tried using hundreds of photos of wild turtles we have marked during our study. We know which turtle is which because of the markings, but the software doesn't use that; it's just taking measurements. 

The results were very interesting--I used photos from 16 individuals, but the software predicted there were 21. Some groupings contained multiple individuals, incorrectly identifying them as one; other individuals were predicted to be multiple.

So why was the prediction so far off? I have several sneaking suspicions. For one, this was my first time performing this analysis; it may be that I need some more practice with the software to improve the accuracy of the predictions. The other possible explanation is that this was the first time the software was presented photos of the same individual over a span of several years. The photos of our resident turtles were all taken on the same day. Could it be that age plays a factor in its ability to accurately make predictions?

The only way to find out is to keep collecting and analyzing data, and your support is what enables us to do so! Without it, we would not have the tools necessary to collect and analyze this invaluable data on box turtles and utilize cutting-edge monitoring methods. 

Thank you for your investment in the future of the eastern box turtle, and have a happy hibernation (er, holiday)!

Links:

• Become a Triangle Turtle Trekker
• WildTrack: Non-invasive Wildlife Monitoring