Ben StegengaViews:
“Emma Kendrick recently wrapped up her time at The Orianne Society as one of our Spotted Turtle Technicians. Finding Spotted Turtles in Georgia is no easy task, but during her time here, Emma played a key role in discovering a couple of new populations. Here, she recounts some of the ups and downs from this past survey season in search of this elusive species.”
– Ben Stegenga
“These might be the last Spotted Turtles you see this season.” The Florida tech, Delana, and I laughed, but we knew that Andrea’s statement carried the weight of experience. Our first two weeks training as Spotted Turtle Technicians with The Orianne Society were coming to a close, and we would go from traveling as a team—working up tens of turtles—to venturing solo through unsurveyed swamps, wondering if Spotted Turtles even existed anymore.
Within my first month of trapping, the Georgia wilderness proved itself to be a formidable… adversary? That doesn’t feel quite right. I’d like to think of it more as a difficult coworker. From spending an hour fighting through dense vegetation in the wrong direction due to some mistaken coordinates, to my first (frightening, for a native Virginian) encounters with feral pigs, I started to wonder what I had gotten myself into for the next four months. Just as I thought I had finally gotten the hang of things, I was humbled once more by the notorious Georgia clay. While trying to get to my site the day after a big rain, I found myself flooring it in my poor front-wheel-drive Ford Fusion through the mud. I’m not quite sure what delusion led me to believe I could make it, but sure enough, after coming up on an impassable puddle, I was helplessly sucked into a ditch on the side of the road. I spent the next seven hours there, as no tow truck dared to try their luck. I was eventually rescued by none other than my former Smithsonian coworkers, who happened to be in the state doing eDNA sampling with Andrea.
They (and their 4WD truck) joined me the next day to check my traps, which had not turned up so much as a mud turtle. It’s hard to describe the feeling of lifting a trap out of the water and seeing those distinctive yellow spots that give Spotted Turtles their name. “Oh my god, I got one!!” I could hardly believe it. I went on to discover two more Spotted Turtles in my traps that day, officially marking a new Spotted Turtle population in an area that previously had no records of their presence.
Although the vast majority of my trapping did not result in Spotted Turtle captures, there was never a boring day in the field. Even on the hottest, buggiest days, all it took was spotting a Green Tree Frog or catching an elusive Two-toed Amphiuma to reset my mood and remind me how lucky I was to have my position. I truly have grown so much throughout this experience—from general herp knowledge to my confidence in my abilities and judgment as a scientist. I was told once that turtle work is 80% luck, 20% skill. Given those odds, and with probably about 15% of the skill attributed to Andrea’s site-scouting and guidance, I’m pretty happy to be ending the season having recorded two new populations of cryptic Spotted Turtles in Georgia.
