CHRONICLE HERALD (Halifax, Nova Scotia) 05 October 07 Patched, hatched and dispatched - Rescued wonder turtle’s baby released into St. Marys River (Kelly Shiers)

This toonie-size turtle has quite a tale: Call it the sequel to the summer’s survival story.

In Chapter 1, a wood turtle run over by a passing vehicle was found by a sharp-eyed motorcycle cop on a busy Halifax street, rushed to surgery, nursed to health and finally recognized and returned to her bucolic river home hundreds of kilometres away.

But Dunlop, named for the tire that split her shell, was pregnant when she arrived at Oaklawn Farm Zoo in Aylesford, where she was taken in July to recuperate from the trauma of her near-fatal ordeal.

And that’s where Chapter 2 begins.

"Every night before I left work and every morning when I got here, I went down to the pond and checked for eggs," said Mike Brobbel, the zoo’s reptile curator, who cared for the injured critter.

His was a task all the more critical because the number of wood turtles has dropped so much that it is considered one of the province’s vulnerable species.

The worry, Mr. Brobbel said, was that the stressed-out Dunlop was already weeks late laying those eggs and if she didn’t release them soon, she would be in danger again.

"Over three or four days, she was just dropping them here and there," he said. "I found six eggs. One was collapsed and two were torn up, so there were only possibly three that could actually be incubated."

The precious mini-eggs went into the zoo’s incubator July 21, three weeks before Dunlop was deemed well enough to go home — not to the streets of Halifax but across the province to a spot along St. Marys River in Pictou County.

Mark Pulsifer, a biologist with the province’s Natural Resources Department in Antigonish, was one of the scientists who organized the mother’s release.

He had a special interest in making sure she got home because he had recognized Dunlop from a picture in The Chronicle Herald that appeared when she was first found. The triangular markings visible on her shell were artificial and proved that Dunlop was Turtle No. 1536, notched as a research subject in one of his own studies.

At the time, he said he could only surmise that someone had picked her up in Pictou County, even perhaps thinking she might make a good pet, and then let her loose.

But Mr. Pulsifer wasn’t only determined to bring her back to familiar waters. He wasn’t about to let any of her little ones go astray, either.

"Right from the very start, when Mike (Brobbel) first told me he had eggs, I told him, ‘Please make sure I get any hatchlings so I can return them to the population where they belong,’ " he said.

"There was never any doubt whether it was one or 10 that they were all coming home. They were all coming back to this area."

So a story that might have ended with the mother’s release back to the wild on a rainy summer day instead continued.

On Sept. 6, one hatchling (too young for anyone to tell its sex) broke out of its egg, weighing only 6.39 grams. The news was bittersweet. More would have been better but one was still a success.

For a week, Mr. Brobbel waited and watched. And when it seemed to be eating fine on its own, he contacted Mr. Pulsifer.

Last week, Mr. Pulsifer went to the zoo to pick up the baby.

The next morning, he placed it in the river, about a kilometre from the spot where its mother had been released, to an area where he hopes the turtle might be able to survive its first winter.

"I didn’t want to handle the turtle any more than I had to or stress it any more than I had to," he said, explaining why he didn’t notch this one in the same way its mother was marked by students in 2005.

As a result, there’s really no way to track whether this little one survives.

The odds, he said, are stacked against it. But then the odds are against these kinds of turtles, anyway. As many as 95 per cent of eggs never develop, are eaten or somehow destroyed before they hatch. Even if they do hatch, the chances of these bite-sized babies surviving to adulthood are minimal at best.

Certainly the odds have been against these turtles at every turn.

But human nature has trumped Mother Nature, at least for now.

Significantly, Dunlop’s baby may be one of a very few hatchlings along that stretch of the St. Marys River to have survived through the summer and into the fall. A flood had submerged 22 nests that were under the close watch of Mr. Pulsifer’s student researchers, and none of those turtles seem to have lived.

"One turtle counts," Mr. Pulsifer said.

"Maybe that one turtle we save will be that one that does live to be 15 or 16 and then goes on to live 30 years after that and successfully reproduces. Maybe that one turtle turns out to be a female, and she in turn will lay eight to 10 eggs every year for her adult life — for 30 or 40 years — and that will make a difference."

So all this effort for a vulnerable population is well worth even an uncertain outcome, he said, chalking up the human intervention to two things.

"One, because we can," he said. "And two, because we care."
Rescued wonder turtle’s baby released into St. Marys River

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• NS Press: Patched, hatched & dispatched - W von Papineäu, Wed Oct 10 11:21:52 2007