Video transcript
The video is 7 minutes and 31 seconds long.
Produced by the American Museum of Natural History, February 2005.
Visual: A woord turtle makes its way across a road. Close-ups of the turtles, and a red car drives by, missing the turtle.
Visual: Title: Sprawl, presented as a street sign.
Visual: Black and white archival photograph of a wood turtle.
Speaker: Paul Sievert, US Geological Survey, Massachusetts Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit
So wood turtles were the most common turtle in the state of Massachusetts, and to indicate that, in the 1800’s people recorded that they went out with their horse and buggy and in an afternoon picked up a hundred wood turtles.
Visual: Archival images of Amherst, Massachusetts and of people in horse-drawn buggy. Paul Sievert in his office.
So they had to be extremely common, and now, if we fast-forward to today, almost no one in this region has ever seen a wood turtle.
Visual: Cars, highways, strip mall. The scientists have parked near the woods with canoes on their trucks.
Speaker: Michael Jones, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
We’re in the lower Connecticut Valley, in Massachusetts, and we’re going to put in on this stretch of river here to locate 10 transmitting wood turtles by radio telemetry.
Visual: Michael Jones and the tam prepare to enter the forest with canoes and telemetric devices
One particular technique for studying individuals, in any population of large animals, is to attach a radio to an individual and locate it by this process called radio telemetry.
Visual: Close-up of a radio receiver
This is our receiver. You can see as I flip through the dials every animal is assigned a number: M24 is a male, F21 is a female. So knowing which animal we’re looking for I can just spin the dial to her number, and I’ve already programmed in the frequency that she’s transmitting at.
Visual: The team moves down the river in the canoe
This morning, hopefully before noon, we’ll get about two miles of river done, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but we’ll have logs we have to pull the canoes over and beaver dams and what not and it can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour to locate each turtle.
Visual: The team continues down the river, some walking with antennae on their shoulders
There are a lot of things about wood turtles that we don’t know. Far more than things about wood turtles that we do know.
Having radio transmitters on turtles will allow us to catch a glimpse of their habitat requirements, the ways that they use the landscape, to allow us begin to formulate a conservation strategy for this animal.
Visual: The team is standing on one bank of the river
I don’t see a turtle Mike.
Yeah, I think he’s on the other side too.
Yeah, up that trib over there.
Visual: A scientists is standing in the water, pointing to a small region of the bank
Well, he’s definitely pretty close, he’s, you know, within this meter basically that I’ve narrowed it down to here. Although, exactly where he is is tough to say.
Oh man, this is the real hard part, is getting this last…
Oh, you got him?
Visual: The turtle is lifted out of the water.
Yeah.
Visual: A turtle makes its way across a grass field, with car traffic in the distance
Speaker: Paul Sievert
In the United States the wood turtle is just one of many freshwater turtle species which is being damaged by suburban sprawl.
Visual: More roads and cars, a parking lot, a road runs along a river
The road kill problem is probably the most significant because all of these homes and these malls that we associate with the sprawl are connected via roads which fragment the habitat.
Visual: Camera pans back to a wide shot showing roads criss-crossing the landscape to the horizon
Habitat fragmentation is when you take a large, unbroken block of habitat, and you separate it into smaller pieces.
Visual:A wood turtles makes its way down a rocky bank to a shallow river
Habitat varies, depending on the organism that you’re talking about. But for wood turtles, the habitat that we’re talking about is the stream and the forested region and the meadowed regions on either side of that stream.
Visual: A wooded area, a turtle slowly approaches a road where a red car is driving by. It pulls back from the noise and motion of the car, and then continues across the road
And so it’s often easiest to lay a road along the flat river bottoms where these wood turtles are found.
But when the wood turtles then make their perpendicular movement from the stream to either go into the forest, to go to vernal pools, or to go up into the uplands to lay their eggs,they are then going to have to cross these roads which have been layed down parallel to the streams in which they exist.
VIsual: The team continues down the river
And so our efforts are to locate what we think are the viable populations of wood turtles and then to describe how wide of an area these wood turtles require on either side of the streams. So we can prioritize how conservation biologists then go about saving these areas.
Visual: Michael Jones is showing a turtle on the ground under the brush, near the river
Speaker: Michael Jones
This is F15, female number 15. She’s an adult wood turtle. We’ve just found her cryptic basking in this shrub area here. So, doing her best to get some sun on her shell while staying out of sight. That white ring you see around her shell is the acrylic holding her radio on—that’s how we located her in the first place.
Visual: Michael Jones notes the value on a GPS unit, and then records it in a notebook. He observes the details of the habitat around the location.
What I do here is I take a GPS point which precisely marks this location, and then I’d fill out a habitat form, so that’ll tell me later exactly the canopy, shrub, herb layer here at the site, the distance that this particular animal is to water, her behavior at the time that I found her. But as time goes by these records will pile up, and when I finally look at it all, at the end of the season, we’ll have her whole home range on tape.
Visual: Measuring and photographing the turtle
We try to get each turtle twice a week. Best case scenario's three times a week. Then there's a smaller chance that we'll miss some huge movement away from the river and back.
Visual: Installing a transmitter on a turtle
Today, wood turtle populations are difficult to assess and identify because the individuals are hard to come across. We’ve been lucky so far, we’ve handled 73 animals, which is far more than we thought we would have by this point.
Visual: The team is using the antennae to find turtles
But even so, we’ve surveyed several rivers and found no evidence of any wood turtles at all, even though habitat is identical to other sites at which we’re finding several turtles, so it’ll probably take this entire year and most of the next to really get our hands around why the wood turtles are very scarce, probably absent at some of these sites, and apparently fairly common at others.
Visual: Close-ups of the turtle moving on the rocky shore of the river
Speaker: Paul Sievert
My hope for the study is that we will actually be able to identify almost all of the wood turtle populations that we need to have as a high priority for preserving by the Massachusetts Natural Heritage Endangered Species Program.
I don’t think that we’re ever going to return to that time where wood turtles are the most common turtle in the state of Massachusetts, but we may be able to, through some very creative management, preserve those populations that we are lucky enough to still have left, before suburban sprawl removes those last remaining populations from the landscape.