HAMILTON SPECTATOR (Ontario) 12 September 03 Box turtles travel slow and live long, studies find (D'vera Cohn, The Washington Post)
Washington: Ken Ferebee recognized her instantly when he saw her in Rock Creek Park. They had met two weeks earlier.
"It's a female," he announced, balancing the small eastern box turtle on his palm as he read the tiny notches on her shell. "Number 68."
Ferebee and other National Park Service naturalists have tracked these famously long-lived creatures in the park for three years and marked more than five dozen. But the turtles can be hard to find. On the recent Saturday that they came across No. 68, a search crew of more than half a dozen people located only two other turtles in two hours -- one equipped with a radio transmitter.
The naturalists know that box turtle numbers are declining along the East Coast. The Washington area is a hub of eastern box turtle research, with at least four ongoing studies, one dating more than half a century.
Box turtles, named for the hinged shell that snaps shut to protect them, putter for decades around a few acres of woods. They are not considered elderly until they are 60. Last year, a 100-year-old male turtle, which had been marked during a study when Warren Harding was president, turned up on Fire Island, N.Y.
But their slow, settled habits can be their undoing. They are easy targets for people who want to take them home for pets, even though it is illegal to remove them from public land. Last year, that practice became a bit of high drama when a man looking for turtles in Rock Creek Park found the body of Washington intern Chandra Levy. They can be killed by cars when meandering across roads. But development, which takes away their habitat and leaves them exposed to predators, is their biggest enemy.
They also are not prolific breeders. A female eastern box turtle seldom lays more than half a dozen eggs per nest, most of which other animals eat. Male turtles sometimes die because they fall on their backs after mating and cannot right themselves.
Considering such risks, No. 68 sat with surprising placidity in Ferebee's hand. From the number of growth rings on her domed shell, he thinks that she is about 18. Two weeks earlier, she was in the garden of a home across the street from the park. Perhaps, he hoped, she dug a nest there.
Turtle count volunteers gathered as Ferebee weighed and measured her, then carefully returned the plodding reptile -- usual speed, nine hours per mile -- to the forest floor.
"She's got a story to tell around the campfire tonight," park naturalist Bill Yeaman said.
Among the Rock Creek census volunteers was Paula Henry, a scientist at the federal Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., where she works on a study that has counted turtles once each decade since 1945. Some marked animals are in their seventies. Eastern box turtle numbers at Patuxent began declining in 1955, plunging sharply after huge floods in 1972. Only now is the population beginning to recover.
Other long-running studies of box turtles are being done by George Mason University researchers in Fairfax County, Va., and at the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary in Anne Arundel County, Md., where 430 eastern box turtles have been marked since 1995.