By Kaitlin Saxton | Research and Husbandry Coordinator
At Piedmont Wildlife Center, we have been tracking eastern box turtles in Leigh Farm Park using radio telemetry for over 10 years. We started with 8, but over the years have lost two. Perhaps they ventured beyond the range of the receiver and can no longer be tracked, or perhaps their transmitter malfunctioned. That's one of the downsides of radio telemetry - the individual, your equipment, or both may be lost at any moment.
Every two years, we bring all of our telemetry turtles in from the field and replace their transmitters. We can also use this time to add more turtles to the study. There are currenty 6 turtles being tracked, and we plan to add two more this year.
Over the summer, conservation intern Ren Rooney made an interactive map of the turtles' locations using the radio telemetry data we have collected over the years. From the map, we can see that the 6 turtles currently part of the project - CHO, AKV, ACM, OPQ, AOW, and CIK - all tend to stay in the southern part of the park. It would be interesting to look for potential telemetry turtles in the northern part of the park and see if their ranges overlap at all with our current turtles, or if they tend to stay in the upper half just as the other turtles tend to stay in the lower half.
Stay tuned for more updates on our new telemetry turtles later this year, and thank you for supporting the box turtles!
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