<
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2025-1-spring/feature/bog-turtle-tiniest-turtle-rebuilding-bogs>
"If I wanted to find a bog turtle, I would need to bring two things: muck boots
and patience. “And not necessarily in that order,” said Brian Parr over the
phone. The natural resource specialist with the Nature Conservancy in
Asheville, North Carolina, was managing my expectations before I visited him in
the northwest corner of the state. Amid the vast forests carpeting the
corrugated slopes of the Appalachians sit some of the country’s only remaining
mountain bogs and a rare, threatened species of turtle living in them.
For slogging through knee-deep mud in search of an animal no larger than a
softball, the boots made sense. The patience, well, that worried me. I had
assumed that bog turtles were slow-moving and therefore easy to find. Parr
snort-laughed at this. Even experts can have a hard time locating the turtle,
Glyptemys muhlenbergii, in the few remaining Appalachian habitats where it’s
holding on—despite its Day-Glo orange neck. The reptile’s short, muscular limbs
easily propel it through a landscape that proves far more challenging to
humans: mud festooned with sedges that poke the skin of the unwary with their
prickly seedpods and half-buried tree limbs waiting to trip traversers.
For more than 200 years, farmers have ditched and drained what seemed like
swampy hellscapes, not investing in their potential as riparian refugia and
buffers for floods or as carbon sequesterers and nutrient recyclers. There were
once about 5,000 acres of bog habitat in North Carolina, but today there are
roughly 500. Over the past century, the numbers of bog turtles and other rare
species that call these mountain bogs home have plummeted with them, including
the small, white-flowered bunched arrowhead and the endangered carnivorous
mountain sweet pitcher plant. Researchers in North Carolina have found fewer
than 100 bog turtle populations across the state. In addition to loss of
habitat, the turtles also face poachers who seek to sell the imperiled animals
on the black market.
Northern bog turtles have federal protection, but their southern counterparts,
bafflingly, don’t. Biologists could boost their numbers by facilitating
baby-making at local zoos and protecting hatchlings during their precarious
first year. But then what? The turtles would have nowhere to go. To begin to
save the threatened species, someone had to rebuild their home. In 2023, Parr
and his colleagues at the Nature Conservancy began creating a fen—a type of
wetland that is closely related to a bog but has more nutrients and less acidic
soil and is fed by seeping underground water rather than rainwater. (Since both
habitats exist in western North Carolina, most people refer to them
indiscriminately as bogs, said Parr.)
Before farming, when the landscape was healthy, many ecological forces had
conspired to create bog turtle habitat. Restoring this habitat is challenging
because scientists have not been able to pin down exactly how it arose from
this landscape. Some historians think that beavers—before the animals were
trapped to near extinction—played an important part by damming creeks and
streams to slow water flow, which made parts of the ground too saturated to
hold trees. Without as many trees, patches of sphagnum moss and sedges grew in,
poking above the waterline to serve as turtle nests and allowing the animals to
bask in the sun. Today, the ecosystem is struggling. When conservationists with
the Nature Conservancy and other wildlife groups began their bog-building
project over a decade ago, they had to perform every ecological task that the
now-absent flora and fauna normally would."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-health-center-rooted-in-nature/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
