In the three years NALT has surveyed the turtles, they have only discovered one juvenile turtle. Photo: Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm

Buttertubs Marsh Park is a bird watcher’s paradise, but the marsh is also home to another animal that, while not always seen, is at risk of being endangered.

The Western painted turtle is a slow-moving freshwater turtle, native to Nanaimo and the rest of western North America. The painted turtle is known for its red and yellow stripes on the head and neck, and the red and yellow painterly pattern on its lower shell.

While the turtles may live for 20 to 30 years, in British Columbia, the species is at risk.

Painted turtles have called Buttertubs Marsh home for many years, and the Nanaimo Area Land Trust (NALT) has been working to make sure that the turtles continue to call the marsh their home with growing populations.

CHLY met at the marsh with Linda Brooymans, stewardship manager for NALT, to talk about their conservation work.

NALT has been surveying the turtles and their nesting habits for three years. Their Western painted turtle project started after Brooymans was first contracted by the provincial government in 2006 to identify all the habitats and areas where the turtles were located on the island.

Basking is when they sit or float in a sunny spot and absorb the sun’s heat through their bodies to raise their body temperature, get their metabolism moving, and produce vitamin D. Photo: Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm

“But their program was sort of starting to wrap up, and I was asking, ‘is there anything that you think that a community organization can do? Something that's not doesn't require too much training, that regular folk can get involved in,’ because I know that people care about the turtles,” Brooymans said. “So we started doing visual surveys at all other areas where people had reported seeing turtles, and from there, we were getting reports from the public, in particular about nesting turtles at Buttertubs.”

When they started surveying the turtles in the marsh, they observed the turtles basking. Basking is when they sit or float in a sunny spot and absorb the sun’s heat through their bodies to raise their body temperature, get their metabolism moving, and produce vitamin D.

“We've gotten a lot of data on the turtles basking, where they like to bask, when and how many there are, roughly,” she said. “There might be some hiding in nooks and crannies that we don't know about, but we've only seen one juvenile, and so that made us a little bit concerned about how successfully the turtles that nest here are able to produce young through to the adult stage.”

In the three years NALT has surveyed the turtles, they have only discovered one juvenile turtle. A turtle reaches its juvenile stage around its fifth year.

Brooymans said they have found that many of the turtles are not reaching their juvenile stage of life because of predation. Predators can get into the nests before the eggs can develop or can eat the hatchlings.

Both local raccoons on land and invasive American bullfrogs in the marsh are the turtle's biggest predators.

“We discovered just by watching the turtles nesting, recording that information, that predators were getting to the nests within hours of the nest being laid. So that's why we've started to put the cages in,” she said. “This is our third year where we're putting these cages. The turtles will lay the eggs between mid-May to late July, and then the eggs take about two and a half months to develop and hatch. We found here that the hatchlings will actually stay in the nest through the spring. So they hatch and then they go into hibernation right away.”

Once a turtle hatches their eggs, a NALT volunteer, or “Turtle Ambassador” as they are called, will place the square cages with wire lining on top of the buried nests. Volunteers will continue to monitor the nests throughout the year.

Currently, there are several nests along the Buttertubs Marsh trail with the cages covering the areas to keep both animals and humans away from disturbing the eggs.

Nesting turtles need a dry, sunny spot located close to the lake to bury their eggs 15 centimetres underground. For the turtles in Buttertubs, that means many will make their nests in the middle of the trail that goes around the marsh.

It is estimated that there are approximately five to eight female turtles capable of nesting in the marsh today.

Currently, NALT is in the middle of collecting its data on how the turtle population is performing in the marsh. They hope that since they started using the cages three years ago, that will mean in about two years, more juvenile turtles will start popping up, demonstrating that their work has led to more turtles reaching maturity.

Once a turtle hatches their eggs, a NALT volunteer, or “Turtle Ambassador” as they are called, will place the square cages with wire lining on top of the buried nests. Photo: Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm

“We're keeping tabs on where they're nesting and whether the majority of the eggs hatch, and we like there was a nest farther down the trail where it seemed all the eggs, I think maybe 20 or so, hatched and made it out,” she said. “You have others where you only have two out of 14 that hatched and made it out. So that means there's 12 eggs in there that didn't develop at all, or partially developed, and then root material got into the egg and killed off the embryo.”

As NALT continues to collect data on the turtle population in the marsh, they have also started working with Coastal Partners in Conservation.

Coastal Partners in Conservation works in conservation efforts for the Western painted turtles, running a recovery program in the Lower Mainland.

“They do have a head-starting program that they've done on the mainland, and where they will take eggs–eggs that were laid in the wild by turtles at a particular site, incubate them,” she said. “Then when they hatch, they'll keep them for about a year until they're a size that they're basically too big for most predators to eat.”

While Brooymans said they hope they don't need to run a similar program to help recover the population of turtles in Nanaimo, NALT is now collecting data with Coastal Partners in Conservation to see if this is the best option.

“A head-starting program is really an intensive management strategy, and it's like you really have to feel like your population is in dire straits, and we just don't know enough about the Buttertubs population to say that a program that intensive is warranted,” she said. “At possible, because it would be awful in 20 years, there are no more Western painted turtles at Buttertubs. It would feel like a real loss.”

Brooymans said that about three years of surveying the turtle’s nesting pattern and survival rates is needed. After they collect sufficient data, the two organizations will work together to figure out how a head start is necessary in Nanaimo.

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.