SUNY Potsdam professor seeks to protect threatened turtle species in North Country

POTSDAM — A SUNY Potsdam professor will use federal funding so he and his students can create safe havens at four sites in St. Lawrence County for “rare” North Country turtles.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has awarded biology professor Glenn Johnson more than $477,000 to “create and enhance” nesting habitat for the Blanding’s turtle, a New York State “threatened species,” SUNY Potsdam recently announced.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a federal-government agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The more common wood turtles, map turtles, painted, and snapping turtles are also expected to benefit from the initiative to create open, sandy areas protected by electric fences, the school said.

The projects on four sites near Canton, Lisbon, Louisville, and Massena will take the “dual approach” of giving the turtles an alternative to nesting in corn fields and “fencing out predatory” raccoons and skunks. The initiative will focus on a minimum of four acres divided evenly between public and private land sites.

“The other big issue besides turtles crossing roads to get to nesting sites is that 90 percent of nests get dug up by human-subsidized nest predators,” Johnson said in a statement. “We will be setting up wildlife cameras to monitor the electric fence to see if it is being breached by these predators and if it is doing a good job of keeping them out.”

SUNY Potsdam students will be involved in trapping and tracking turtles; doing habitat assessments and nest surveys; setting up fences and cameras; and analyzing data. The group will fit trapped turtles with radio transmitters and GPS trackers to determine their preferred nesting areas. Nearby females will then be moved into project sites just prior to nesting, an approach that has been successful with wood turtles and Blanding’s turtles in Massachusetts, SUNY Potsdam said.

The initiative, set to continue into spring of 2023, is a collaboration with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and one of its wildlife biologists, Angelena Ross, a 2002 SUNY Potsdam graduate and current adjunct faculty member. In addition to providing technical expertise on turtle habitat, she will handle regulatory aspects of the project, including wetland and archaeological concerns.

About nesting turtles

Turtles nest in sandy substrates and their eggs are allowed to be incubated by the sun. Females provide no additional parental care other than good site selection. Keeping areas open and free of predators allows the developing turtle eggs to have a temperature balance “critical to development.” Turtles often select corn fields that seem like good nesting areas, but once the corn grows, the shade increases mortality by slowing embryonic development. The sudden addition of shade can also upset the temperature balance that determines whether the young form into males or females — more bad news for the Blanding’s turtle, which is considered at risk of extinction.

The North Country has some of the species’ largest remaining populations in the Northeast, but its numbers in the region were reduced by past environmental contamination from large industries, loss of wetland habitat, and increasing mortality by vehicles, Johnson said.

The nesting habitat project follows on an initiative Johnson launched three years ago to post turtle crossing signs along county and town roads alerting drivers to turtle presence at key nesting areas. The signs will appear again this year around nesting season, which runs between late May and early July, the school said.