Many of us were taught as children that the difference between a turtle and a tortoise is one of habitat; turtles live in the water, tortoises on land. The eastern box turtle, then, must be the exception that proves the rule. It’s called a turtle, but water isn’t its thing—you’re much more liable to find one strolling along the leaf-litter in a forest, or resting in the middle of a dirt road.
The eastern box turtle gets its name from its shell, which, unlike that of other turtles, can completely seal the animal inside itself as an armored box. Box turtles are omnivores, feeding on leaves, fruit, insects, and worms. Box turtles searching for food on the forest floor are a fairly common sight for people hiking in deep deciduous forests.
However, box turtles are not as common a sight as they once were. Over the course of only three generations, populations of the turtles have declined by more than 32%, causing the species to be uplisted from Near-Threatened to Vulnerable. There are multiple reasons for this decline, including the destruction of their forest habitats, the illegal harvest of turtles from the wild to sell as pets, and their vulnerability to being hit by cars.
All of these factors are compounded by the fact that box turtles can live for up to a century and have a very low reproductive rate—females reach maturity at a late age, and while they lay large numbers of eggs, very few of them survive to adulthood. It is estimated that of all the eggs a female box turtle lays in her lifetime, only two or three will survive all the way to adulthood.
Davidson College’s Box Turtle Conservation Project, headed by Dr. Michael Dorcas, is intended to determine the size and stability of Davidson’s box turtle populations. This is done by capturing turtles in the wild, taking measurements of them, and marking their shells before releasing them. After the turtles are released, the rate at which they are recaptured can be used to calculate the size of the population at any given time. This information, in turn, can be used to improve conservation policies.
This is where ordinary townsfolk like you come in. If you see a box turtle that doesn’t already have markings on its shell, bring it to the Davidson College Herpetology Laboratory (herpetology means the study of amphibians and reptiles, such as turtles) so that it can be measured and marked.
There are many other things Davidson citizens can also do to help protect turtles. One of the most important is to never buy box turtles as pets or take them from the wild with the intent to keep them as pets. As mentioned earlier, box turtles have long lifespans and low reproductive rates, so removing them from the wild causes the population to drop. Likewise, if you see a female box turtle laying eggs on your property, do not dig the eggs up. Instead, if you wish to protect the eggs, the best solution is to build a roof of chicken wire over the nest so that predators such as raccoons and opossums cannot eat the eggs. Make sure the holes in the wire are not too small, because if they are the baby turtles will be unable to leave once they have hatched.
Finally, if you see a box turtle crossing the road or walkway, the best thing to do is simply to stop and move it out of the way. Being hit by cars is one of the top causes of death for turtles. Simply by moving a turtle out of harm’s way, you may not only be saving its life, but those of many future generations of turtles.
Box turtles lack the charisma of big mammals, and they certainly aren’t as eye-catchingly attractive to us as birds are. But in their own humble way, they’ve just as important to the ecosystem they live in. The box turtle is a shining example of how all animals—not just the large and spectacular ones—deserve the attention of conservation groups.