Andrea ColtonViews:
Monday
I started off my week in many a field biologist’s least favorite location: the office. But office work is essential for organizing and running all our fieldwork, so I opened my laptop for the day. First, I handled receipts for expense reports. Field supplies aren’t cheap, and I needed to buy two essentials for recording data on turtles. We use small sets of calipers to record morphometric data like shell length/height and spring scales for measuring weight.
The Orianne Society is aiming to find new populations of Spotted Turtles in the Southeast, which means a lot of exploring and getting field supplies together for trapping. Once my expense reports were done, I opened a valuable tool for finding new sites and handling habitat and spatial data: ArcGIS. I added wetland locations I found the previous week to my map of Georgia and updated my notes. Then, I looked at my list of sites across Southeast Georgia that seemed promising for Spotted Turtle habitat and looked for possible wetlands within them on my map. I found four new sites near me that I was eager to explore that week.
Tuesday
The first site of the week was a large tract of land, so there was a lot of ground to cover. I drove around the property, constantly checking my maps to see when I might be approaching a wetland to check out. The first place I stopped was a bit of a trek, but I was willing to make the journey for good habitat. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it. I spent a frustrating amount of time fighting through heavy vegetation and finally made it to the wetland. There was water, but the surrounding vegetation didn’t seem quite right. Spotted Turtles prefer areas with standing vegetation and tree cover, but this spot was open and choked with grass that wouldn’t allow me to easily set traps, anyway.
I made the journey back to my truck after one wrong step sent me falling into the water. Luckily, it didn’t take long before I found a long stretch of nice, forested wetland that seemed to go on for miles and would offer plenty of opportunities to find turtles. Its vastness, however, meant that there are a plethora of places for turtles to hide. There was a second site not too far from this one but it was late in the day by the time I got there so I resigned myself to a short drive to scope out habitat from the truck. Most of the site was a swamp and there were previous turtle records nearby, so I had high hopes for it producing a population. A light afternoon rain brought a Cottonmouth out onto the road, so I escorted it off on my way home.
Wednesday
After hours of fighting through thick trees and heat on Tuesday, I aimed to give myself an easier site but end up walking more. Many of the roads at the site were closed to motorized traffic so I packed up all my gear and prepared for the walk. Tiny freshly developed Southern Toads were hopping all over the road where water had gathered in puddles. I made it down to a brackish marsh area crawling with crabs. Salty water wasn’t what I was aiming for so I backtracked into the forest and found multiple creeks and patches of forest that were damp and likely held water in the spring.
As I walked to the next site, I stirred up too many Six-lined Racerunners to count. I arrived at the next site and saw an impenetrable wall of trees. Regardless, I did my best to make it through to see if they were concealing decent habitat. From what I could tell, it’s an extremely tree- and shrub-dense patch of land that held some water but would have been next to impossible to trap so I fought my way back out. To finish out the day I visited a couple of sites Spotted Turtles had been observed this spring but they were within city parks and private property, neither of which made for good trapping.
Thursday
Houston and I visited a rare site on my list. It contained a turtle record from a few years ago and was one that The Orianne Society hadn’t trapped yet, so we were excited to get out and check out the wetlands. Our first stop was a nice patch of muddy hardwood wetland that looked like it held a good amount of water and was likely where the turtle from our record spent some time. We did our best to get around to other wetlands but residual flooding from Hurricane Debby was still posing considerable hindrances. While the water was a headache for us, it was a great spawning ground for the hundreds of Southern Toads we saw hopping across the road. We were also lucky enough to find a male Gopher Tortoise making his way back home from an excursion so we helped him back to his burrow.
After a few more hours, we found more wetlands that looked like they could be suitable for Spotted Turtles and called it a day. For the rest of the afternoon, I ran errands. I went to a few hardware stores to find small files for notching turtles, supplies for disinfecting our traps and equipment between sites, notebooks for data recording, and containers to hold all our turtle data collection kits.
Friday
I was making my way to the day’s site when I had the sudden realization that I forgot to bring socks for my waders, so the first stop of the day was a dollar store. I made my way down to a small pond at the site and began looking around. I was rewarded with large tracts of Cyprus swamp and hardwood forest wetlands. I also found patches of sandhill with burrows but couldn’t find any Gopher Tortoises this time. Further upland from the pond, I found two more patches of hardwood forest wetlands full of water. I was happy with this week’s wetland finds and was excited to see that many held enough water for trapping in a few weeks. Spotted Turtles are typically most active in the spring, but we may have luck in the fall once the hot summer temperatures of Georgia cool off a bit and turtles begin moving again.
