Andrea ColtonViews:
Monday
At The Orianne Society, we prioritize public outreach and communication, as research is most valuable when shared with those who can benefit from it. Beyond engaging fellow researchers, connecting with the public is vital for building interest and support for our conservation efforts.
Today, the Science Initiative spoke with students at Georgia Southern University. Houston, our Director of Science, gave a talk highlighting Orianne’s work with Spotted Turtles, flatwoods salamanders, and indigo snakes over the years. The presentation was made even better by the appearance of a small male indigo snake, one of our educational animals.
After the talk, we sat down with about ten students. Houston, Ben, and I shared insights into our career paths, answered questions about working for a nonprofit organization, and offered advice on overcoming challenges in the conservation field. Of course, the students also had more one-on-one time with the indigo snake.
By the end of the day, it was a rewarding opportunity to inspire and support the next generation of biologists and conservationists as they embark on their careers.
Tuesday
Today was a much-needed day at the office! You never realize how many things fly under your radar when you’re in the field for days on end. I spent a decent chunk of my morning testing GPS loggers. We have 10 mini-GPS loggers that will eventually be epoxied onto the shells of Eastern Box Turtles and provide useful information about where they spend their time. As helpful as they are, they’ve proven to be a pain in my neck. It is essential for them to lock onto enough satellites for the very first recording to be able to process data once the loggers are connected to my laptop.
Evidently, my back patio is not the ideal place for picking up satellites and I have been receiving nothing but error messages for days. I even tried driving to a local park, setting a logger out in an open grassy area, and camping out in my car while it recorded. My goal is to let the logger record in one place for a few hours, upload the GPS location information to ArcGIS, and assess its accuracy. Does it consistently record the same location each time, or is there some level of error? If there is, how many meters off can we expect points to potentially be and how can we correct for that when we analyze the data? Today was not the day I solved that mystery so I resigned to try again another day.
Instead, I cleaned up my maps for potential survey sites in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida and reassessed which sites we’ll officially trap in the spring based on recent visits.
Wednesday
Today I took a quick trip up to South Carolina to check out a site I have listed as a priority for Spotted Turtle trapping in the spring. I tried visiting this location a couple weeks ago but was thwarted by a special hunt I was not aware of until I had already driven all the way there and was greeted with a sign telling me I could not enter.
The site is adjacent to a river and has some small wetland areas scattered away from it. Many areas seem too deep but there are isolated patches of what appear to be decent wetland. Some are located in the middle of timber stands, which is not ideal since disturbed and fragmented habitat does not typically bode well for Spotted Turtles. When I’m site scouting, I’m often looking at dry wetlands and attempting to envision what they may look like in the spring after they collect rain. It’s a challenge, but part of the process.
Thursday
Today, Ben, our two herpetological technicians, and I made our way to south-central Georgia to tour around the site we’ll be using for our Eastern Box Turtle project. Our aim is to find turtles, affix them with transmitters and those pesky GPS loggers, and collect data on habitat use and home range size. The hardest part of this, by far, is finding turtles in the first place.
Luckily, Ben has worked at this site before and found Eastern Box Turtles, so we mostly drove around as he pointed out spots to me that he’s seen turtles and gave advice on how to navigate the sometimes washed-out roads and mud pits that form after it rains.
The four of us wandered around a sandhill area with Gopher Tortoise burrows and looked for box turtles. Box turtles typically respond to precipitation and begin moving after rain so I had hope they would be out and about. Perhaps the excessive amounts of rain the night before were too much for them, as we had no luck finding them today.
Friday
We tried again to find turtles today. There was a slight drizzle last night and we were able to start earlier in the morning than yesterday. Box turtles are most active in the early morning and late afternoon when temperatures are cooler than the midday sun provides.
We spent a few hours wandering around an open forested area but were met with no turtles once again. However, we did come across some interesting finds: numerous hooded pitcher plants, two tiny Little Grass Frogs (the smallest frogs in North America), and a small Cottonmouth cooling off in a little stream (video below).
The tall grass is a major hinderance to finding turtles as it makes spotting them incredibly difficult. There are many tufts of grass they could be hiding in so finding a turtle comes down to chance. We gave up for today and planned to return in the spring after they have burned the site, making it much easier to see the ground. Plus, I had a four-hour drive back to my apartment ahead of me.
Video of a Cottonmouth swimming for cover to hide from us.
