turtles

Today I had a reason to refresh on the Blanding's turtle literature. For the most part what I found online was disappointing, and for the most part it missed key elements of the habitat as well as the biggest threats.

It's easy enough to itemize a list of habitat types, and at first glance it seems to be fairly wide... sedge meadow, marsh, pond, river backwater. But that fails to take into account the fact that these are surprisingly mobile turtles. Saving or restoring one wetland is going to do little good.

In 1997 I had an opportunity to collaborate with the Lake County (Illinois) Forest Preserve District on a Blanding's turtle project. We gathered background information and then surveyed several preserves. Once we'd found one where turtles were relatively easy to find... which meant discarding 10 or 15 snapping turtles and painted turtles from our traps for every Blanding's turtle... we held a couple of individuals long enough for the county to put radio transmitters on them.

One of those animals quickly left the small but deep marsh where we'd captured it and then released it a day later. It walked roughly north for about 800 meters, crossing the state line into Wisconsin in the process. It stayed there, in another marsh, for a few weeks before returning to yet another marsh in Illinois.

This points out several management challenges. The "core habitat," the marshes where the turtle spent days to weeks before moving to the next core, were all of pretty good quality. But it had to cross relatively small areas of less pristine upland habitat to make those moves. Fortunately, in this case, there were no major roads in the way.

Then there were the management unit boundaries. At that time, the species was state listed in Wisconsin but not in Illinois (where it has since been added to the protected list). It crossed not only a state line, but from county land to private land and back again. The original capture location had been less than 100 meters from yet a third unit, a state-owned parcel and for all we knew perhaps it had been there a week earlier. Each unit had different management regimes, different philosophies at work.

Another management challenge, one poorly understood at best in anything I read earlier today is the key set of threats or stressors. There's the usual discussion of habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation and certainly this does play a role.

But the central issue is neatly summed up in a 1993 paper by Congdon, Dunham, and Loben Sels (in Conservation Biology). They focused on demographics, on the fact that in their Michigan study area juvenile and adult survival is not sufficient to maintain the population of this very long-lived animal, which may not breed until 17 years of age and can live to be at least 60.

Some of the reasons are at least related to habitat. Certainly outright destruction of habitat results in direct and indirect mortality. Perhaps of more importance, when adult turtles need to cross busy highways on those long movements between core wetlands, a certain percentage of them become roadkill. Since adult Blanding's turtles, which can be quite large, apparently have few natural predators, this kind of removal of breeding age animals from the system is a problem.

The authors point out another less obvious problem, one that I saw no references to earlier today despite it being clearly identified 18 years ago; increases in the populations of mid-level predators such as raccoons, foxes, and skunks have led to a substantial increase in egg predation. In the Michigan study, there was no recruitment at all in some years.

There's plentiful indirect evidence of this on some of my Midwestern study sites. Walk certain open, sunlit upland areas in June, and the remains of turtle eggs are all around. Most of these are from more common species, but some of them are Blanding's turtle eggs.

It's challenging enough to put together roadless preserve complexes of sufficient size, with enough core wetlands, to support a Blanding's turtle population of any size. It's even harder to deal with raccoons, which abound for many reasons... fragmentation, edge habitat, loss of larger predators which once kept them in check, the near-demise of the fur trade, and the abundance of suburban garbage cans to help support large populations of omnivores through lean winters.

Head starting alone isn't enough, although it's been successful in some places. It's labor intensive and may require decades of sustained effort. If the preserves are still fragmented, if some of those turtles die on roads, if mid-level predators still are abundant, then it's just treating symptoms and not going after the real problems.  

In this case, some of the answers are clear enough. The question is whether the political will exists to address them.

summer

Although things are expected to be relatively calm this coming week, I'm about to hit my peak summer activity time.

First, it's almost Hine's emerald dragonfly monitoring season. Although I won't have quite as much happening as last year (when we had eight people in the field on any given day, working on two different projects), it's still going to be a busier field season than anticipated.

Toward the end of that period, I'm going to take a break of a few days to attend the National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration (NCER) in Baltimore. My paper presentation is on August 2nd, and this year I'm stepping back from the hard science side to talk about policy, politics, and collaboration. NCER always inspires some fresh thinking, and as before I'm expecting to record my thoughts here in near live time from the conference venue.

organizations

Over the past few years I've had opportunities to interact with a variety of institutions on restoration projects. At the moment I'm thinking of lessons learned from two of those entities.

Both are large, sprawling government agencies. Both have entrenched bureaucracies and complex, difficult to navigate organizational structures. In the case of my experience, the difference has been in the people who have been my point of contact. Those people are the reason that one of those agencies will build successful projects in spite of the organizational structure, while the other will continue to wonder why things never work out as planned.

Both of the people I've been working with understand the structure of the agencies they are a part of. One of them uses that knowledge to communicate across departments, and to give us advance knowledge of the best ways to get things accomplished within the system. It's a daunting task, and he sometimes shows the stress. But without him, it would be almost impossible to achieve the end goal.

The other person seems to have preconceived notions and a lack of understanding of the motivations of departments outside of his own. He's given us inconsistent guidance. He recognizes what's broken, but instead of cross-communication, instead of understanding why others ask for the things that they do or explaining his own perspectives, he's only added more complexity. Writing additional guidance won't help if no one reads what they already have, and no one talks to the people who have institutional knowledge. It's not complexity that's needed, it's simplification, understanding, and communication.

It's all been a good reminder that no matter how rapidly technology advances, in the end it comes down to the effectiveness of the people involved in the project.