NEWSDAY (Melville, New York) 30 June 05 Turtle-tracking effort is underway (Bryn Nelson)
On a Friday afternoon at the William Floyd Estate in Mastic, the blazing sun seems to conspire against an impromptu survey of Eastern box turtles. But then, as if on cue, a maintenance worker appears outside Rich Stavdal's office, proudly holding one of the reptiles in his hand. The worker had repeatedly seen it by the maintenance shed, he says, and eventually brought it inside.
Stavdal, head ranger and naturalist at the National Park Service-run estate, laughs at the fortuitous timing, then sets to work. He examines the hard plastron on the box turtle's underside and its domed shell, or carapace, seemingly painted with orange sunbursts.
"It's a female," he says, judging from its brown eyes, relatively short, thin tail, and lack of either a hooked beak or concave plastron.
For 25 years, Stavdal has methodically marked and tracked the estate's box turtles, following in the footsteps of onetime estate resident and noted naturalist John Treadwell Nichols. "She will be the 724th turtle since I started in 1980," Stavdal says.
Other naturalists are following suit, with a new turtle-tracking effort under way at Caleb Smith State Park in Smithtown.
Many of the lumbering tenants of the Mastic estate, including a box turtle first marked with a penknife by Nichols in 1921 and recaptured more than 80 years later -- when it was at least 100 years old -- have withstood decades of change. The turtles have aged with second-growth forests reclaimed from farmland and survived devastating brushfires. And they have retreated within their shells to evade suburban raccoons, an increasing threat to turtles and their eggs.
Habitat loss has further confined them to islands of green throughout Long Island, where they often spend their entire lives within a 250-yard radius.
"As I always say, 'A bird can fly away, a mammal can run away, but a turtle can't,'" Stavdal says.
After taking the turtle's measurements, he files notches into four of the geometric scutes along the edges of its shell. The notches follow a pattern chosen by a computer program that allows the reptile to be readily identified if recaptured.
Turtle No. 724, marked by Stavdal and released, soon crawls through the sunbaked grass toward the shadows beneath the maintenance shed.
Later that afternoon, at Caleb Smith, Eric Powers affixes an orange disc with the code E-084 to a battle-scarred female box turtle that had been found in a neighborhood just outside the Smithtown park. Powers, director at the park for Western Suffolk BOCES, notes that the new addition to his survey project bears possible scars of a raccoon attack. She is missing part of her tail, and her carapace and plastron are pitted.
Nevertheless, she's lucky.
"I started the project because I was seeing that the habitat all across Long Island was being decimated," he says. One box turtle was picked up from the parking lot of a new Staples store, where it returned after its winter hibernation, perhaps thinking, "What happened?"
Turtles brought in by residents from other parts of the Island are being housed temporarily in an outdoor pen. Powers hopes to release them in the park after two hibernation cycles, when they may be less apt to instinctively return to homes that no longer exist. But first he wants to assess the park's native turtle population to ensure it can tolerate immigrants.
The afternoon's captive, probably a park resident that wandered outside the oasis of green, submits to measurements by Powers and lab aide Barbara LaGois. After a photo session and hike to the top of a trail, E-084 regains her freedom in a pile of leaves, the light filtering through the forest canopy to the yellow-dappled sunbursts on her shell.
To volunteer or for information about school involvement in the turtle survey at Caleb Smith, call 631-360-3652.
Turtle-tracking effort is underway