RESTORE COOTES

Turtles move slow but they can cover a lot of ground. When the weather warms in the spring, male and female turtles start to roam, with female turtles seeking nesting sites to lay eggs. They are busiest during May and June, but will be making their rounds anytime between April and October ( Source ).  The babies hatch later in the summer or early fall and are born into a world of danger, with predators being a top hazard, but roads play a role in reducing the hatchling's survival rates.  Less than 1 in a hundred turtle eggs laid will hatch and grow into an adult turtle. ( Source )    Turtles take a long time to reach sexual maturity, meaning that maintaining a robust population requires protection. Adult snapping turtles, for instance, have a 99% survival rate in the wild, but road mortality tips the scales against them. The loss of a fertile adult female creates a huge deficit in the survivability of the species in a region.  A good source for information on tu...

Playing Mother Nature with the Blanding’s turtle Hamilton Spectator By Mark McNeil  They don't move too fast, but they go pretty far. And that's a big part of the reason why Blanding's turtles are in such peril in Cootes Paradise and other wetland areas of Royal Botanical Gardens property. Females like to ramble long distances before laying eggs and that can get them run over by automobiles, scooped by kids looking for a pet, or facing other dangers. Consequently, numbers of the reptile listed as threatened by the province have severely declined to a point that RBG biologists estimate there are only four or five in all of Cootes Paradise and maybe another 20 in the Grindstone Creek (Hendrie Valley) area. Faced with the real prospect of losing the species from the area altogether, RBG workers have decided to play Mother Nature using radio telemetry and incubation. This spring, they outfitted three reproductive Blanding's turtle females with radio transmi...