Spotting Turtles
Spotted turtle study reveals habitat preferences and movement patterns
BY PETER B. BRACE INDEPENDENT WRITER
Paddle almost any island pond in the spring and summer and you will undoubtedly see plenty of painted and snapping turtles. Spotted turtles, however, will be hard to come by.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent Sarah Treanor (above) and Emily Molden have been monitoring the habitats, and habits, of the island's spotted turtles. "Last year, we put radio transmitters on some of the turtles to see where they were going."

Sarah Treanor, a research technician for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, and Emily Molden, the Nantucket Land Council's resource conservationist, now have a good idea of where the elusive spotted turtles are on Nantucket.

Two years into a three-year study of spotted turtles and their habitat in two parts of the island, Treanor and Molden are getting a bead on what these rare turtles are up to throughout the year.

"Emily and I collaborated a couple years ago when we first started trapping them again," said Treanor. "She was trapping at the Loring property and I was trapping at Squam swamp. Since then, we have increased the study of the turtles. Last year, we put radio transmitters on some of the turtles to see where they were going and what their habitats were."

Treanor and Molden discovered spotted turtles all across the island, including their study areas of Squam Farm, Medouie Creek, Linda Loring's 270 acres off Eel Point Road, Windswept Cranberry Bog, Sanford Farm and kettle holes in the Middle Moors. But most of the island's spotted turtles are found in the northeast section of Nantucket, said Treanor.

Using traps placed in known spotted turtle habitat - red maple swamps and sphagnum moss bogs - Treanor and Molden trapped nine turtles last year and seven so far this year, attaching tiny radio transmitters to them to learn where their microhabitats are within their home ranges.

Using handheld global positioning system (GPS) units with radio receivers, once Treanor and

Molden locate a turtle, they note its location so that

at the end of each season they can see which habitats they are moving to and from, and how far they travel each day.

During the turtles' active season - May through October - Treanor and Molden track their turtles two or three times a week, logging their locations.

"It will us help with our management of them. But it is also to avoid active management of areas that turtles are using during certain times of years," said Treanor.

What she and Molden have learned is that spotted turtles do a lot of traveling depending on their needs during the course of four seasons. Living primarily in the shallow wetland habitats of sphagnum moss bogs and red maple swamps, this pair learned that Nantucket's spotted turtles also feed and breed in vernal pools, lay their eggs in grassy, sandy areas upland of wetlands and traverse whatever terrain they must to reach these areas within their ranges.

"The kind of important thing I'm interested in is they do use the uplands," said Treanor. "If those areas are sectioned off and the wetlands are isolated, the turtles won't be able to travel to the various wetlands they need to complete their yearly cycles."

Molden said that Land Council former resource conservationist Cheryl Creighton, now executive director of the Tuckernuck Land Trust, began spotted turtle observation on the island at Squam Farm in the early 1990s. She and Treanor have trapped and released at least two of the turtles that Creighton marked during her research more than 16 years ago.

On May 23, 2006, the Fisheries and Wildlife Board of the state's Division of Fisheries and Wildlife removed the spotted turtle from the Species of Special Concern list, which is third in importance behind Threatened Species and Endangered Species. Fisheries and Wildlife placed the Spotted turtle on the list in 1986 when there were only 24 areas where the turtle was known to live. Today, that number is up to 960.

On Nantucket, however, Treanor and Molden do not have an accurate count of the island's spotted Turtle population, and won't for at least another year.

"Basically, all of our data is preliminary right now, but we need three years of data to say for

sure," said Treanor. I