June was a busy month for turtles, and perhaps an even busier month for conservation technicians working around the clock to preserve delicate turtle eggs.
rare Charitable Research Reserve extracted 2,000 snapping and midland painted turtle eggs in the Wellington County and Waterloo Region area alone to place them in incubators at their Cambridge facility for 60 to 80 days until they hatch and are released back into the county.
According to rare, all eight species of turtles found in Ontario are at risk due to human interference of habitat destruction and habitat fragmentation and only one out of 100 snapping turtles live long enough to reach sexual maturity.
The organization responded to several calls from Guelph residents who spotted turtles in areas considered dangerous for the animals such as soccer fields, roadsides, bike trails and parking lots.
The recent surge of turtles in York Road Park last month garnered a lot of attention when eight snapping turtles were found nesting across the soccer and baseball field overnight.
“That one night at York Road Park, I got 114 eggs,” says conservation technician Sarah Marshall.
Marshall says the community seemed very on board with the York Road Park turtles saga where residents came out of their homes and offered coffee, cookies and sandwiches to the technicians while they were hard at work.
“It was a really heartwarming community moment,” says Marshall.
Marshall says the organization received more calls from Guelph than the other cities the organization participates in.
“I don’t think there are necessarily more turtles in Guelph but I think that the community is very engaged with conservation in Guelph,” says Marshall.
“I think just because the Guelph community follows a lot of the Guelph social media and knew about the project and are generally a very environmentally engaged group of people, we've gotten a lot of calls from the Guelph area.”
By the end of August or early September, the babies will hatch and rare will return the nests within 150 metres of where they were laid in the best possible habitats.
“The ones from York Road Park, I think we would probably find a nice wet place that's fairly calm along the river there. We wouldn't want to just toss them right into the curb. Somewhere nice and safe where they can hopefully survive,” says Marshall.
“Hatchlings survivor rate isn't particularly high but neither is egg survival rate so we're hoping that we are giving them a little boost.”
She says there will be an odd incident like a micro-crack on an egg that will start to mould because the embryo doesn't develop properly.
Marshall says often times, the organization will get eggs that have already been damaged because they are in a place like a soccer field or a parking lot where someone might have driven over the eggs resulting in little cracks hindering their development.
Last year, rare released 1025 hatchlings back into the wild.
Marshall says the organization has to cap the egg extraction at 2,000 because of the incubator capacity at their facility.
“Each incubator that we buy can house another 1000 turtles. With more funding, we can cover more area, and ultimately help more turtles,” says Marshall.
The organization is trying to raise money for more incubators to support the turtle project. As the turtle project is only two years old, Marshall says each dollar helps.
Donations for the project can be made here.
