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My name is Jared Green, I work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the
Eastern Massachusetts National Wildlife Refuge Complex and I'm also a graduate student at
the University of Georgia researching the effects of head-starting on
a Blanding's Turtle repatriation project.
So we're actually going to try and catch a juvenile turtle.
We catch all our turtles once in the spring and once in the fall.
For our head-started turtles they wear radio transmitters that have radios that need to
be swapped out every six months to replace the battery.
Our juvenile turtles, since they are a little bit larger they can wear a radio that gets
a larger battery, and so this guy actually doesn't need a radio swap, but we still capture
them each year in the spring in the fall just to see how much they're growing from the
previous capture.
The Blanding's Turtle is a threatened or endangered species in all the states in New England in
which it occurs.
Here in Massachusetts they are listed as a state threatened species and so two of
the larger populations in New England occur on wildlife refuges in Massachusetts, and
so what we're doing is we're trying to start a new population here at Assabet refuge,
taking hatchlings from one of our other refuges.
And so how we're doing that is we go out in June to one of the refuges that has a stable
population and we actually go out and protect all the the nests that the females lay.
We do this by going out to the nest site and watching the females as they lay their eggs
and then putting metal fencing down to protect the nest from predators such as raccoons and
coyotes.
Then we come back a couple of months later and actually remove the hatchlings
from the exclosures. And then half of those hatchlings get released right into the wetland
at the donor site. And the other half come to Assabet to be released.
So half of that half that comes here actually is directly released into the wetlands here
at Assabet and then the other half we actually head-start - which is basically just raising
the hatchlings in captivity over their first winter to increase their growth rate.
And how that happens is the turtles are kept in warm water and they're being fed every
day, and so that actually increases their growth rate by three to four times what it
would be normally be in the wild.
Our hope with this is that when we release these head-started turtles
into the wetland they'll have a much greater chance of survival just because they're so
much larger.