By Sara Steffen | Director of Conservation
This Spring, I’ve been busy educating folks about all the amazing things we are doing with box turtle research in NC. I’ve had the opportunity to present our box turtle research at two different conferences, including the International Citizen Science Symposium held in Raleigh, NC. I also was asked to be Assistant Chair of The Box Turtle Connection, so now play a bigger role in this statewide project.
Without your support we would not have been able to afford the cost of the two conferences. These sessions are so important for the future conservation of box turtles, because without sharing this information, we won’t be able to conserve turtles outside of our study areas. Education is the key to conservation. We can study, research, and collect data on box turtles, but if we’re not educating the public, what good will it do? Our goal of presenting The Box Turtle Connection is to showcase how it can be fairly easy, inexpensive, and not time consuming a citizen science project can be, and how it is a model for other regional projects. In addition, we talked about Turtle Trekkers and showed how we may be able to provide a non-invasive way to monitor box turtle populations. We’ve attended many community events this year to promote the Turtle Trekker project. We’ve already received a lot of box turtle emails, and even better, our Turtle Trekkers are starting to learn the methods of taking photos, so that we can use them with our software. Don’t forget to check our website if you don’t know how! And, if you find a box turtle and you don’t remember what to do, just snap a photo – it may be useful in the future!
We’re very excited for Turtle Trekkers to take the next step. Thanks to our colleagues at WildTrack we now have access and have been trained on the Turtle Trekker software. This summer we’ll be training our conservation interns to use WildTrack’s software. They will help us organize and analyze the photos in our database. This is a big step in our Turtle Trekker project and we’re excited to start analyzing photos! Keep an eye out for box turtles this Spring!
Lastly, I wanted to provide an update to the previous report. AKV, the turtle that woke up in December, has emerged from brumation and is doing just fine! This shows that some turtles will come up (for unknown reasons), and may not need any kind of human intervention, like rehabilitation.
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