LANCASTER NEW ERA

LANCASTER NEW ERA (Pennsylvania) 10 May 05 Turtle diary - A small movement is afoot to capture local box turtles to help them survive in the wild. (Ad Crable)
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania: If you’ve spent time wandering the woods or driving, chances are you’ve crossed paths with the eastern box turtle.
Perhaps you came across one lumbering through the leaves and chuckled as it stopped dead in its tracks and retreated into its shell, tighter than a drum.
Perhaps, like me, you were in your car and spotted one inching across the macadam. You pulled over and ran back, hoping you could get to the helpless reptile before the next car did.
Richard Szarko was 8 or 9, living in Bethlehem, when, en route to a shopping center one day, his dad abruptly pulled over. He left the car and came back, thrusting a box turtle through the window to his son in the back seat.
It was Szarko’s first turtle, and he kept it for three years before letting it go.
That memory came flooding back a Sunday in 2003 as Szarko was driving his family to church on Route 283. He spied a small lump on the dashed center line and immediately recognized it as a box turtle.
Like his father, he brought the turtle to his East Hempfield Township home for his children to experience.
Being an amateur naturalist, Szarko knew the plight of the eastern box turtle, once so common in Pennsylvania, has taken an alarming downturn.
Even though it doesn’t need much woods to live out its whole life cycle — box turtles can live up to 120 years — development and roads have so fragmented the box turtle’s world and put it in jeopardy of being run over that it is in serious decline.
Knowing all this, the 48-year-old former anesthesiologist wondered if he could breed box turtles, then distribute the progeny back into suitable habitat to bolster populations.
He acquired a male companion, fenced a 40-foot-wide area in his yard full of shrubs, plants and trees, and went at it.
It’s been tough. He has to see where the female buries her eggs, protect them from marauding skunks, raccoons and crows, then dig them after hatching, about two months later.
Then he takes the youngsters inside to spend a winter in an aquarium. The turtles are fed cut-up red worms, chopped boiled eggs and store-bought turtle food rich in minerals and vitamins.
In the wild, mortality is high. A female turtle doesn’t even reach sexual maturity until 12 years old, and it’s estimated that of about a few hundred eggs she may produce over the following 60 to 80 years, maybe two or three hatchlings actually reach adulthood.
In three years, Szarko has successfully raised 10 hatchlings. He’s released some into a state park in Cumberland County and some to a private woods in Dauphin County.
There are others who are doing the same thing to help the turtle of their youth.
Al Spoo, a 68-year-old self-made naturalist extraordinaire from Rothsville, has raised box turtles for 15 years, all from a pair he found on a hillside near his home.
“The babies are free to come go,” he says. Occasionally a groundhog digs under the fence of his one-acre sanctuary and wreaks havoc on the box turtles.
But overall, he notes, “they’re safer here than in the fields. I find them cut up by discs and plows.”
Richard R. Busch, a retired preparator for the North Museum of Natural History and Science, has been raising and releasing box and other species of turtles for 25 years. Many he releases near his home near Speedwell Forge Lake.
And there’s John Gilbert, of Stony Creek Mills outside Reading, who’s been bolstering local box and other turtle populations for some 40 years. He has four box turtles that he thinks could be 15 to 20 years old.
Why the affinity for box turtles?
“It’s just that they’re fascinating,” says Gilbert. “They’re not dumb; they’re smart. They know who you are.”
Adds Spoo, “No two are alike.”
It would seem the efforts of Szarko, Spoo, Busch et al would be universally applauded.
Not so.
Some say that, no matter how well-meaning, those who remove box turtles may, in fact, be unintentionally sentencing them to death.
This school maintains that box turtle populations are so tenuous, are so tethered to their specific area and have such a high mortality rate that removing even one adult might shatter a group’s ability to sustain itself.
That’s the position of Dr. William Belzer, a Clarion University biologist. “Only recently, as box turtle populations are vanishing, have biologists begun to understand the delicate population dynamics of this species,” Belzer wrote in a position paper.
“One recent study concluded that loss by pet collection, traffic, etc., of just one adult box turtle from a population each year or two will doom that population to eradication in the distant future! Too few young are growing up among their elders to replace the losses.
“Pet collecting is a major cause of the eradication of the species in many areas, but releasing and moving turtles also contribute.”
Because they have a homing instinct, Belzer says that a turtle removed from one spot and later released back into the wild more than a quarter-mile away will not find its way home but may starve itself spending years trying.
If that’s not reason enough to avoid picking up a box turtle for a pet or propagation, Belzer says there’s the danger of humans passing on pathogens or diseases from other animals to turtles. When eventually released, the infected turtles might spread the disease among other turtles.
As a member of the Herpetological Advisory Committee for the Fish and Boat Commission, the agency responsible for protecting the state’s reptiles and amphibians, Belzer pushed for regulations that would make it unlawful for anyone to remove a box turtle from the wild.
So far, the full committee and the PFBC have not taken that drastic step.
“It is clear the box turtle’s worst enemies are not curious children, enthusiastic teenagers or amateur herpetologists,” PFBC says in a position paper on its Web site. “Any decline in box turtle populations is more attributable to housing subdivisions, new highways, increased traffic on current highways, habitat loss and fragmentation.
“A single four-lane highway cut through prime woodland box turtle habitat could literally eliminate more box turtles in one county than would be removed from the wild across the entire state by legal hobbyists.”
Currently, in Pennsylvania it is legal to collect up to two box turtles daily. It is unlawful to sell, import or export any reptile or amphibian, or to tamper with their eggs.
The box turtle got some needed protection in 1994 when it was placed on an international list of creatures that could not be removed from the country.
Szarko wholeheartedly agrees box turtles shouldn’t be taken from the woods as pets. “They’re not friendly and they don’t interact with children. I don’t consider mine pets,” he says.
He doesn’t let anyone other than himself handle his turtles because of disease concerns he’s read about.
But he feels that his efforts are helping, not harming, the creatures he so admires.
“I don’t feel bad about something that brings them back in the wild,” he says. “If I get 25 babies to survive, then I’ve beaten nature’s odds and I’ve supplied back to nature more than I’ve taken.”
http://www.lancasteronline.com/pages/news/local/4/14232