BALTIMORE SUN (Maryland) 11 July 03 Terrapins' long journey ends where it started
Rescue: A transplanted Maryland artist travels from California to free her hand-raised turtles back into the Chesapeake. (Howard Libit)
Jan Elmy may not live here anymore, but she's still trying to save Maryland's official reptile.
Determined to replace dozens of diamondback terrapins she saw killed three years ago by careless mowers on the Eastern Shore, the award-winning artist has spent two years raising nine tiny turtles in her new home in Northern California.
After orchestrating a cross-country trip for herself and the terrapins, Elmy is returning them to Elliott Island in Dorchester County, where she found them as clutches of eggs, completing an effort that at one point included caring for as many as 169 turtles.
"I just want them to go back to the same spot," said Elmy, watching the nine terrapins splash around in plastic containers minutes after being delivered to a friend's Northeast Baltimore home Wednesday. "They've been a part of my life for so long, I'm sad to see them go. I'll never know what happens to them, but it's what I wanted to do ever since I started saving those eggs."
Elmy's relationship with the diamondback terrapin began on June 1, 2000, when she was living on Elliott Island and came upon a county maintenance crew working along the highway.
"I was appalled, horrified, to find dead terrapins all along the side of the road," recalled Elmy, 54. "The females came up on the side of the road to lay their eggs, and they were annihilated by the county mowers."
Unable to stop and help at the time, Elmy got permission from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to do the next best thing: She began searching for endangered nests of terrapins, digging out and saving eggs that otherwise were sure to be eaten by predators or destroyed by man.
"These turtles and eggs were extremely vulnerable, but because of the loss of their natural habitats they didn't have anywhere else to go," Elmy said.
She dug up 187 eggs, eventually producing 169 baby terrapins. "I had turtles everywhere," she said. "I had them in shoe boxes under my bed, makeshift incubators. ... It was an awful lot of work, but it was so thrilling."
About the same time, after years as a struggling artist, Elmy captured the top prize at the prestigious Rittenhouse Square Fine Arts festival in Philadelphia in 2000. Suddenly her work was sought by East Coast galleries, in particular her still-life paintings of Tastykake snacks.
"If I had to go to a regular job, I wouldn't have had the time to help the terrapins," Elmy said. "Suddenly, the prices of my works started going up, and I had the money and the time."
The diamondback is not classified as an endangered species, but scientists say they have relatively little data on the reptile that is the mascot of the University of Maryland, College Park.
Many think the Chesapeake Bay terrapin population is declining, and a year ago, Gov. Parris N. Glendening announced a plan intended to preserve and restore terrapin habitats, promote research on the species and require crab pots to include devices that keep out turtles.
Not everything in Elmy's terrapin preservation effort worked out as planned. Knowing that terrapins' gender is influenced by the temperature of their eggs during incubation, she tried to keep hers close to 82 degrees, which she had heard was the optimum for females.
But all of Elmy's terrapin hatchlings turned out to be male. Researchers at the Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, N.J., had discovered that temperatures near 90 are best for females, while males are most likely at 79 degrees.
"I'm just delighted they were alive, because otherwise they wouldn't be in existence," Elmy said.
After almost six months of raising turtles, Elmy decided to spend the winter with her boyfriend in Garberville, Calif., a mountain town about 200 miles north of San Francisco. Realizing she couldn't take 169 baby terrapins with her, she turned most of them over to DNR for use in school programs that have since been scaled back because of budget cuts, according to natural resources officials.
But Elmy kept the five smallest terrapins, which she thought were too tiny to survive handling by school children. She packed them in a cooler and carried them on the airplane to California, where she cared for them all winter.
The next summer, Elmy returned to Elliott Island and released three of the five that had grown large enough to survive. And when Maryland Public Television spent a day taping her for a story on the diamondback terrapin, Elmy came across two more clutches of vulnerable eggs.
With the DNR's permission, she took them back to California, where she had decided to live full time. She fashioned a makeshift incubator and watched as 10 of the 29 eggs hatched, again all males.
"I don't think anybody thought any of the eggs would hatch," she said. Three of the newborns died, but seven survived to join the two tiny terrapins remaining from Elmy's original batch of 169.
Two years later, with all nine turtles 4 to 6 inches long, Elmy decided to bring her last brood home.
Rejected by the airlines, Elmy said, she turned to an animal transportation company, Feathers & Fur Van Lines of Coquille, Ore., for the cross-country trip. The company gave Elmy a discounted "rescue" rate, and donations from the Garberville Rotary Club and others helped finance the shipment.
DNR officials say they think it was the first time Maryland diamondback terrapins had been raised so far from their native waters. They also say Elmy's actions were legal, though unusual, because she had official permission to dig up the eggs.
"She's compassionate and passionate about these terrapins," says Howard King, the DNR's chief of fishery services. "We certainly don't encourage this. But in this case, the eggs were either going to be saved and reared by her, or they were not going to make it."
Although the results of an examination by a DNR veterinarian weren't complete, the turtles appeared to have come through their six-day road trip without ill effects. As soon as they were freed from their individual plastic travel containers, they began churning though water in the Baltimore home of a friend with whom Elmy is staying.
Throughout, Elmy refused to give names to any of the terrapins. "I never thought of them as my pets," she said, but she added that she'll suffer separation anxiety when she releases them into the water on the edge of Elliott Island.
Elmy said there's no way she can take back another clutch of eggs to raise and that she is frustrated that all of her terrapins were males.
"I would love it if someday there could be a grant, where someone could find a way for me to come back to Maryland for six months to raise more terrapins," Elmy says. "And this time, I'd make sure I had the right temperature. I still want to bring back those female terrapins."
Terrapins' long journey ends where it started