On days when Dr. Anna Thonis is in the field searching for eastern box turtles, her volunteers fan out throughout a large piece of wild habitat, intently looking at every patch of dappled sunlight making its way through the canopy —prime spots to find a turtle sunning itself.
The people, who search with their eyes, are often accompanied by Dr. Kris Hoffmann and at least one of her two wildlife detection dogs, who amplify the human efforts by searching for turtles by their scent.
Dr. Thonis, a researcher with New York University, is in the midst of a multi-year survey of Long Island’s eastern box turtle populations. Now in its second year, this work came to the North Fork for the first time this year, surveying two undisclosed sites in late May and early June in a partnership with Group for the East End.
Box turtles were abundant on Long Island in the early 1900s — in 1916 naturalist Roy Latham found 70 box turtles in a field in Orient, and Dr. Thonis said that people who grow up here “will say there were more turtles everywhere.”
Documenting What Long Islanders Have Long Known
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation lists eastern box turtles as a “species of special concern” due to habitat loss, road mortality and the species’ collection as pets, but to best conserve a natural population, you need to meticulously document where it is found.
Over the past century, longterm scientific surveys of Long Island’s box turtle populations were done from 1914 to 1958 and again from 1980 to 2002, Dr. Thonis told the Southold Town Board back in April when asking for their blessing to conduct the survey on lands managed by the town. But since that time, there is no Long Island data, and the only data from the North Fork was collected by Roy Latham in the early 1900s.
While Dr. Thonis believes the turtle population here has dramatically declined, without the data, it’s just a hunch.
“Having her do this is really crucial,” said Group for the East End’s Outreach Director, Taralynn Reynolds, as she joined volunteers combing the woods in a North Fork preserve the first week in June, looking for turtles. “We know they are declining, anecdotally. We fragment their habitat, and destroy their habitat, and then they have to cross roads.”
Several representatives of The Group, which received a North Fork Side by Side for the North Fork surveys, joined the volunteers on this hot June morning — the surveys are conducted now because it is the time of year when turtles are most active.
On the South Fork, the project is funded by the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation. Other survey sites are in Brookhaven and on Staten Island.
In addition to the fragmentation of their habitat, turtles often fall prey to poachers, said Dr. Thonis, which is why the survey sites are being kept secret.
On one of the South Fork sites this spring, the volunteers and wildlife detection dogs found 49 turtles in one day earlier this spring.
A Walk in the Woods
But this day on the North Fork, things were going slowly. A dozen volunteers fanned out through a preserve, searching woodlands, meadows and marshes, while 7-year-old Newt, a Labrador retriever and trained wildlife detection dog, could smell turtles but couldn’t find them.
At this site the previous week, they’d found a total of seven turtles, so they knew they were there. But two hours in, they hadn’t found any live turtles.
Group for the East End Environmental Associate Sofia Vallecillo had found one shell of a turtle that had died long enough ago that many of its scutes (the scales that make up the pattern on its shell) had fallen off, exposing the bone below.
“I see this as a really good sign of search effort,” said Dr. Thonis, who had set up a field laboratory at a bench in a clearing, waiting for volunteers to bring her turtles to tag and measure. “The most valuable thing I tell them is don’t expect you’re going to find a turtle. As long as you’re looking and searching, that’s what’s important. They’re hard to find. Volunteers finding things that aren’t the target are a real good indicator they’re looking.”
Turtles are often found in patches of dappled sunlight, where they can bask in the heat of the sun but still easily crawl to shelter, or near a food source like wild strawberries, insects, grubs or fungi.
“It’s super important for ectoderms to move between sunny spots and shaded, where they have lower herbaceous cover and sun patches,” said Dr. Thonis. “Their body temperature is pretty much the same as ambient temperature.”
Volunteer Ron McGrattan was the first to find a turtle about two hours in — and she was after strawberries.
It was only his second day volunteering with the group, but he’d already been dubbed “the turtle whisperer” for his ability to find turtles.
Ron said he grew up in Brooklyn, where the only animals he saw as a child were rats and cockroaches. But when he was 6 or 7, he was sent out to Long Island for the summer through the Fresh Air Fund, where he found a turtle in a ditch with the family he was staying with in Islip.
“I couldn’t believe it was alive. I thought it was a rock,” he said. That experience would eventually lead him to college work in ecology and marine science, and a lifelong love of Long Island’s box turtles.
“You find them in fields. When I was growing up, they were everywhere in fields on Long Island,” he said. “It would take half an hour to find seven or ten of them.”
Ron said he’d found a field full of turtles when rehabbing a house in Riverhead about 10 years ago.
“That is the exact kind of story we’ve heard time and time and time again from people who grew up here — how many turtles there used to be,” said Dr. Thonis. “But we don’t have the quantitative evidence.”
The turtle Ron found that morning was a female — they could tell from her brown eyes and other more subtle characteristics of her shell. Males have red eyes, and often a slightly concave plastron — their lower carapace — which makes it easier to mount females to mate. The researchers could tell from the growth lines on her scutes that she was around 10 years old.
She seemed curious about her surroundings as Dr. Thonis took toenail clippings and a small blood sample to bring back to the lab for analysis of her DNA and the nutrients in her body. Using a set of “notch codes” provided by the DEC, Dr. Thonis then filed a series of three small notches on the edge of the turtle’s carapace so that any researcher that might collect her in the future could learn more about her past from the data being collected this week.
Notching of turtles has helped to document the oldest turtle found on Long Island — at the William Floyd Estate in Shirley, which was recently found alive with notching from the early 20th Century, making it at least 100 years old, she said.
“Turtles are so resilient — they can recover from so many kinds of damage, but it also takes a long time to recover,” said Dr. Thonis as she weighed Ron’s turtle. “Everything they do is slow. There are circumstances where they can live to be very old.”
But that’s in a perfect world, and some forest management practices now underway are actually damaging the turtles. There have been recent reports of box turtles killed during prescribed burns conduced by the DEC and the Pine Barrens Commission in Brookhaven.
“Pine barrens are fire-dependent ecosystems, but the issue is that these burns are killing the turtles,” said Dr. Thonis. “People will say the turtles evolved in the pine barrens habitat, but they didn’t evolve with all the other things we are now causing them to die from — vehicle strikes, dogs. If the burns were done in March or April or late October or November, most box turtles would have already gone into their hides or the winter. It would reduce mortality significantly. I’m hoping to work with the Pine Barrens Commission on this. They are aware and they do care about this issue.”
Finding and Findings
As Dr. Thonis continued to measure Ron’s turtle, another volunteer, Alex Whittle, pinged into the group’s text message chain that he had found a turtle not far from her research station, in the same patch of dappled sunlight where Newt had scented but been unable to find turtles earlier that morning.
Newt, who had been frustrated by the lack of finds that morning, had been hanging around the research station throwing his ball to volunteers.
“He doesn’t care about the turtles. He cares about the ball,” Dr. Hoffmann had warned the group at the start. “He will walk for seven hours to get that ball, stay on task and keep going.”
Dr. Hoffmann and Ms. Reynolds decided to take Newt out to a new section of habitat in the massive preserve — and not far from a busy roadway, in a meadow on the edge of a stand of trees, Newt’s tail went crazy. Then he began rooting at the edge of the woods before sitting down. Dr. Hoffman walked over. Sure enough, he’d done his job. Another very large female turtle was hiding in her box next to him. Newt went for a swim, a valuable reward for his services.
The volunteers returned to the field lab with the third turtle of the day. By the end of the day there would be four.
The counting is expected to continue in future years — and Dr. Thonis is expected to issue a call for volunteers again next year.
“I got my Ph.D. because I care about reptile conservation, and being able to make an impact on the conservation of a species,” she said. “We have to make it so people who are living where the animals are living care as well.”
You can still help this year.
Dr. Thonis and Group for the East End have created a North Fork Turtle Watch survey asking the public to document sitings of turtles crossing roads throughout the North Fork.
The survey can be found online here.
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