PACKET & TIMES (Orillia, Ontario) 09 June 07 Sad week for turtles; Many travelling to sunny slopes to lay eggs killed on road (Bob Bowles)
It has been a busy but sad week for us here at Kids For turtles Environmental Education. We mentioned last week to expect female Midland painted, Blanding's and snapping turtles to be out of their wetlands and crossing roads looking for nest-laying location this week.
We know that hundreds of both male and female turtles are killed every year on highways - the males in mid-May as they come out to move to another wetland to mate, and the females in late May and early June as they come on land to look for well-drained, sunny, sandy slopes to lay their eggs. We did not expect to find as many female Blanding's turtles, a threatened species at risk in Ontario, killed on the highways this year.
We found several dead female Blanding's full of eggs and crushed on the highways. It is sad when you consider that a female Blanding's has to wait until it is 12 to 14 years old before they are developed enough to mate and lay eggs. They then come out of the water and have to move farther than in the past to find nesting locations due to shoreline development.
We now have more people, more cars, and more highways which bring the female turtles to play the deadly game of trying to cross the road to find suitable nesting sites. Many females - full of eggs for a future generation - never make it to their nesting sites and back to the wetland. This week we found several of them crushed on highways. We rescued any eggs still intact and buried these in a suitable well-drained site near wetlands, but we have no idea if these will be successful and hatch into baby Blanding's in the fall. This is the highest turtle traffic time of the year and the number of turtles on roads will drop once egg-laying time passes. There will be another high-turtle-traffic time in late September when the eggs hatch and baby turtles try to make their way back to wetlands. The public has been a great help reporting turtle observation on roads and helping turtles escape from the danger of passing vehicles. Kids For turtles would like to thank you and ask you to join us in learning more about and protecting the world around us.
You can contact us at info@kidsforturtles.com or call 325-3149.
http://www.wellandtribune.ca/webapp/sitepages/search/results.asp?contentid=564582&catname=Local News&type=search&search1=turtle
