The Endangered Species Road Trip by Cameron MacDonald

Author:Cameron MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55365-936-5
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2013-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

After three days of intensive family time, I need to get away, and searching for an endangered wood turtle provides the perfect excuse to get out of Dodge. I ask Briana if she and the kids want to come along, but she prefers to hang out at my parents’ house (or more likely she prefers not driving anywhere for a while). Besides, she is somewhat oblivious to the growing tension between me and my father, and thus she is having a perfectly relaxing vacation. So that is how I find myself driving north, with only the pooch for company, for what will be my first night away from the family since Finn was born.

When I started my biology career in the early 1990s, one summer of field research in Algonquin Provincial Park turned into five more years and, eventually, a graduate degree. Even nowadays, when I dream of landscapes—which, trapped in my urban existence, I do a lot—the dreams are often of that rolling Canadian Shield: the silhouettes of white pines, the blazing orange of sugar maples in fall, and the sound of wolves howling on a winter night.

During my years in Algonquin, I caught and tagged and sometimes tracked a variety of species, and one of these species was the endangered wood turtle. The wood turtle project was a side project of my graduate supervisor, Ron Brooks, and thus it was a side project of mine. A typical day of wood turtle research during nesting season involved driving out to a known nesting location in the late afternoon and then waiting around for a turtle to climb out of the water and lay its eggs. After the turtle was done nesting, we would have to catch her before she slid back into the water and disappeared. Then, having caught the turtle, we would dig up the clutch of eggs and measure both the eggs and the female. If the female hadn’t been previously caught, we would mark her by notching her shell and attaching a metal tag. The research not only helped to monitor the faltering wood turtle population but also identified changes in reproductive investment over an individual’s life, among other things. Having now caught and tagged many species, I now think turtles are particularly great to work on because they seem quite agreeable to human handling. Contrarily, I am now reluctant to condone or participate in the netting and banding of birds, the trapping and tagging of mammals, or the marking of amphibians by clipping a unique series of toes, unless the questions being posed by the researchers are truly pressing.

Wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) are handsome turtles. They have a tan, nicely domed shell with prominent scutes and a strikingly yellow bottom shell called a plastron. The skin on their legs and neck is yellowish or sometimes reddish. Like most turtles, they are aquatic omnivores, but in contrast to their close relatives, they have terrestrial tendencies—in summer, they are sometimes found quite far from a water source.

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