Schoolkids make efforts to save turtles

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WASHINGTON COUNTY – Struggling to stay quiet, 15 drenched 6- and 7-year-olds crouch in the underbrush, coaxing tiny snapping turtles to crawl toward the sandy shore of a small lake.

“Don’t flip over. OK, sweetie pie,” whispers one little girl.

“Mine’s winning!” yells a boy, before being shushed from all sides.

“Bye, little buddy,” says another.

The 47 3-inch-long turtles that pupils from Bay Ridge Elementary School in Cutler released into the wild Tuesday could help support a future for a species that isn’t expected to survive past these children’s lifetimes.

“Only 1 in 50 hatchlings survive to adulthood, so statistics aren’t on their side, but it’s the best chance we can give them,” said Susanne Kynast, a turtle researcher and environmental educator from Machias.

“This lake really tells us what snapping turtle habitat should be like. If nobody traps them, they’ll have a pretty good life here,” she said.

Snapping turtles have been around, looking pretty much the same, since the time of the dinosaurs. Huge, lumbering creatures that can bully everything else in the muddy ponds where they live, the turtles have not evolved for speed. A snapper can live to be 300 years old and doesn’t even start breeding in Maine’s cold climate until its mid-20s.

Increasingly, cars have done what predators never could, and snapping turtle numbers have been falling drastically, particularly in ponds near roads, Kynast said.

“The new evidence that’s surfacing just points more and more toward extinction,” she said.

At this point, every turtle makes a difference, so Kynast jumped at the change to save these turtles when Mary Hammond called last fall.

Hammond was walking last fall on the small sandy beach outside her camp on Round Lake, located in a township just west of Cutler, when she spotted a clutch of snapping turtle eggs that still hadn’t hatched. Worried about frost, she gathered up the eggs and brought them into the camp.

“I put them in a plant pot, and we called the turtle lady,” said Hammond, who teaches this combined first- and second-grade class.

After only moments in the warmth of the camp, the eggs started hatching.

“It was exploding with little turtles everywhere,” said Kynast.

Last year’s cold, wet summer was very difficult for turtles, she explained, so many tried to hibernate in their nests. But the nests at Round Lake weren’t buried deep enough and the turtles probably would have frozen.

Farmed out to three elementary school classrooms, Kynast’s home and two professional wildlife rehabilitators, 48 of the 52 turtles survived.

Though all of the turtles were the same age, those raised in cool water with minimal food – the closest to their natural winter state, had shells that barely reached 2 inches in length.

Three hatchlings, raised in the full 24-hour light of a classroom heat lamp, were roly-poly beasts with shells at least 6 inches long – already too large to become prey for a raccoon or fox.

“In the wild, this would be 10 years of growth,” Kynast said, holding up one of the largest hatchlings.

If they’re lucky, these turtles will remain in the shallows, hibernating every winter for the next 12 to 15 years. Then, she said, “they’ll find themselves a rock or a log that they like, and stay underneath it for the next couple of centuries.”

These turtles already have an advantage. As eggs, their chance of surviving to adulthood was only 1 in 1,500. As hatchlings, that has improved thirtyfold.

Despite researchers’ attempts, however, there’s no proof that “head-starting” turtles works. Biologists have observed that if there are no older turtles nearby to teach hatchlings how to hibernate, they’ll likely freeze to death next winter.

No one will ever know how these baby turtles fare, because the only means of marking the turtles – microchips or bone implants – are too expensive.

“If you paint the shell, the turtle will suffocate,” Kynast said.

But Round Lake may offer better potential than many waters. Since it’s accessible only by logging roads, far from any highway, the pond harbors old turtles. In her research, the biologist has caught turtles older than 100 years in this pond. In fact, one popped its head out of the water Tuesday afternoon while Hammond’s class was swimming.

What these pupils learned about snapping turtles may be more valuable, in the long run, than whether these particular turtles survive. They now see snappers as animals that need their help, not as frightening monsters lurking under docks.

“If they move just one turtle off the highway in their life, they could be saving 3,000 eggs,” Kynast said.

“The biggest thing about this is just kids appreciating snapping turtles and loving them,” she said.