Counting his turtles after they hatch

Jeff Green | Aug 26, 2010

Pat Grace likes turtles. And he sees a fair number of them from his house on Bobs Lake.

Pat and his wife Cathie were seasonal residents at their property off the Badour Road for over 20 years, and about five years ago they decided to sell their house in Toronto and retire on the lake.

Pat’s always been interested in the wildlife around their home, which is located on a peninsula off a small bay on the lake, and particularly interested in the turtles that trek up from the water each spring looking for a suitable location to dig up a nest and lay eggs.

The risk this involves, for the turtles themselves, comes from vehicles driving on the gravel road that runs by his house, and he has put up turtle crossing signs.

“A lot of times I would see the turtles one day, and the next day I would find a dug up hole and scattered egg shells,” said Pat, when interviewed last week at his home.

So, Pat began to work on a way to protect turtle nests. The first problem is finding the nests before the raccoons do, and this involves waiting around while the turtles find the location that suits them best. Once the eggs have been laid and the nest covered up, Pat has to make sure he knows where it is. The next thing he has to do is cover it.

When he first started trying to protect the nests he used old pallets. He would cover the holes in the bottom and sides of the pallets so the raccoons could not easily lift them out of the way.

But he only had mixed success with that method.

Then, two years ago, Pat contacted Mike Yee of the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority and asked him what he could do for his turtles. Mike Yee recommended that Pat join the Toronto Zoo’s Turtle Tally, which turned out to be an easy thing to do. (For further information, go to www.torontozoo.com/adoptapond and click on the Ontario Turtle Tally button.

The program has been set up to help naturalists from the zoo identify the numbers and distribution of different turtle species across the province, and also to help disseminate information about turtle species to participants. Through his involvement in the tally, Pat came into contact with turtle experts from the zoo, and with their insight and his ingenuity and handiwork, a pretty effective turtle nest cage has been developed.

He uses steel cloth, which he bends into an inverted bowl shape and then affixes to the ground over the nests using tent pegs.

Turtles tend to dig their nests out of pretty dense ground, not sandy beaches as some people think, so the tent pegs are very hard to move. “If a person can’t pull the pegs out, a raccoon won’t be able to either,” Pat said.

The wire cages have been working well, and over the last two years, Pat has seen a number of tiny one-inch turtles emerge from the ground in early to mid-September. To give them an extra hand, he places them in a cooler filled with water, photographs them, and then carries them to the water. “That 150 feet is quite a distance for those tiny little turtles,” Pat said.

Once they reach the lake, the turtles still have to contend with birds and fish that feed on them when they are young.

The vast majority of the turtles that Pat sees on his property, and on Bobs Lake generally, are Northern Map turtles, so named for faint, map-like lines on their shells. Map turtles also have a yellow spot, behind each eye. The adult females range from 18 to 27 cm long, while the males are smaller, 9 to16 centimetres, and they are listed as a species of special concern in Ontario. He also sees painted turtles on occasion, and, rarely, Snapping Turtles and Blanding’s turtles.

One common local misconception, Pat Grace says, is that the Snapping Turtles are very common in the region. “A lot of people mistake Northern Map turtles for Snapping Turtles,” he said, “because there is an overlap between the two in size. The major difference is the tail. Northern Map turtles have a short tail and Snapping Turtles have a great long tail. Once you know that it is easy to tell them apart.

“Another myth is that Snapping Turtles bite swimmers. They only snap on land, and only when they feel threatened, they never bite in the water.”

The turtles in the nests on Pat’s property have been mostly Map turtles, and over the last couple of years, he has been protecting up to eight nests each year. He has had a pretty high success rate, with up to 6 to 10 turtles hatching from each of the nests.

Pat has kept in touch with naturalists from the Toronto Zoo about his turtle project, and last week a group of scientists came up from the zoo to look at his nests, and to tour around Bobs Lake looking for turtles.

“I think they were happy to get out of the city,” Pat said, “and they said there seemed to be a lot of turtles, and a good number of younger turtles, on Bobs Lake, so the habitat must be in pretty good shape. There are lots of spots on the lake where I regularly see eight or more adult turtles lying out in the sun on a log, and I took them to some of those spots.”

Pat Grace has come to be the turtle expert among his neighbours and he is more than willing to share information about something that has become a bit of a passion for him. He even has drawn up plans for turtle nest cages, which he makes available for interested parties, and has done presentations for groups and schools.

There are nine species of turtle that are found in Ontario, and all but two of them, the Midland painted and the Western painted, are listed as either “species of concern” or “threatened species”.