CHRONICLE-HERALD (Halifax, Nova Scotia) 11 August 07 T L C; Dunlop, the little wood turtle that was run over on a busy road this summer, isn't just any turtle. She's Turtle No. 1536. (Kelly Shiers)
This is a turtle tale with a twist: a saga that starts off sorely with a wounded, pregnant wood turtle on a busy Halifax street and ends, in true storybook form, at a picturesque Pictou County stream hundreds of kilometres away.
Her fabled cousin learned that slow and steady wins the race. But perhaps the lesson this time is that a little help from strangers can make finishing even the most difficult trek a lot more possible. "This is where she belongs. This is home," Mark Pulsifer said as he led a group of scientists and onlookers to a spot along East River St. Marys on Thursday.
In his hands he held the squirming wood turtle, her legs thrashing flashes of bright orange in the pouring rain, her head straining out of a shell scarred by the ordeal of being struck by a vehicle early last month.
"She's picked up the scent of the river. . . . She knows she's home," added John Gilhen, a wood turtle expert and former curator of the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History.
"I think this is a marvellous thing."
Marvellous. And unlikely.
Just last month, the chances that this turtle would survive, let alone ever swim again in familiar territory, were almost nil.
Mr. Gilhen remembers reading The Chronicle Herald story about a pregnant turtle that had been rescued by a sharp-eyed motorcycle cop after she was run over on the city's busy Purcells Cove Road. He looked at the picture of Dunlop (nicknamed for the tire that likely ran over her) taken at the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital, where her broken shell had been pieced together with fibreglass and resin.
What he saw were the small, telltale trian-gular markings filed onto her shell that showed Dunlop had once been documented by researchers.
"I recognized that turtle as one of ours as soon as I saw it," Mr. Gilhen said, adding he believed she had likely come from along the Musquodoboit River, the St. Marys River or perhaps even River Inhabitants in Cape Breton.
"I thought, 'This girl's going home. She's lucky.' "
That same day, Mr. Pulsifer, a regional biologist with the province's Natural Resources Department in Antigonish, was also reading the story. He also noticed the tiny triangular shapes notched into the turtle's shell. But as the man who heads up a wood turtle project on the St. Marys River, he was even more certain about those marks.
"When I saw the notching pattern, I said, 'It's one of ours.' "
Mr. Pulsifer wondered, and continues to wonder, how she got so far from home.
But he knew two things for sure.
"We wanted that turtle back here . . . and we also wanted the hatchlings."
After staff searched through their records, Dunlop was eventually identified as Turtle No. 1536, notched by students working on the St. Marys River in 2005. But the information also revealed that she hadn't actually been found by the students. In fact, that year they were even surveying for turtles along that particular stretch of waterway. Rather, she'd been brought to them by a passerby who found her, likely as she tried a perilous crawl across the road. The researchers notched her, made notes about where she was found and then returned her to the water in that area.
"That is how we know this is the exact location," Mr. Pulsifer said. "This is it."
By the time Mr. Pulsifer had gathered that information, the injured turtle was recuperating at Oaklawn Zoo in Aylesford under the watchful care of experienced reptile curator Mike Brobbel.
And that's where she stayed, foraging with 20 or so other turtles in a closed pond, until Wednesday, when Mr. Gilhen placed her in a dog carrier in the back of his car to begin the trek home (with just one overnight stop at Mr. Gilhen's Halifax home). She left behind three eggs that are now in a zoo incubator and Mr. Brobbel says if they hatch next month, they'll be "the icing on the cake."
But why all the fuss over a turtle?
"When you look at these big, black, weepy eyes, you fall in love with them," Mr. Gilhen enthused that day. And perhaps that's true.
But what's also true is that wood turtles, one of only four turtle species native to this province, is considered vulnerable - just a step below threatened.
Its situation is so serious that a management team, including Mr. Gilhen and Mr. Pulsifer, is working to try to ensure its population survives, through ongoing research and education and by working with landowners to protect their preferred habitat, the meandering rivers that wind through valleys and prime agricultural land.
"They're dwindling mainly because people take them home as pets," Mr. Gilhen said.
"Not only is it illegal to do that, but it's a darn shame. They take them home, show them to the kids, and then let them go," he said, guessing that could be what happened to this one. "There are probably hundreds of wood turtles just wandering around in the woods of Nova Scotia for the rest of their lives - and that could be 20, 30, 40, 50 years - completely useless to the breeding population."
The loss of even one adult female is a huge blow, Mr. Pulsifer said. "A female can probably reproduce for 20 to 30 years, so to lose a female like her means you're losing eight to 10 eggs every year. And even if only five per cent (of those eggs) - if that many - would survive, that, over time, is a significant loss."
Mr. Pulsifer said the research and conservation work underway now will make a long-term difference to the wood turtle population, but the effects might not be known for decades.
Still, this case shows the value of their work, he said.
"We know this project is doing good because we've got this turtle back here," he said.
The fact that so many people were interested in getting this turtle well and home again is very telling.
"It says something about us as a people if we have that understanding and we want to make sure our wildlife is secure," Mr. Gilhen said. "If people would just kill them or discard them, then that says something else about the people."
Of course, all of that was lost to the story's main character as she was carried down the slippery slope to the river's edge Thursday. With a splash, she was released from the hands of Kyle Biggar, one of the St. Francis Xavier University students working on the wood turtle project this year.
She floated momentarily on the surface before quickly moving out of sight of the rain-drenched scientists, students and interested onlookers who waited on the road above to see the latest chapter of her story unfold.
And when she was gone, with just a little prompting, they cheered.
She's Turtle No. 1536.

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