Founder Carolyn McInerney runs the project at the Savannah, Ga., property, rescuing the terrapin eggs from bunkers, which can often be easy pickings for predators like raccoons and crows, and later releasing them. This year, the program will incubate close to 2,000 turtle eggs.
What started on a whim with eggs hatched in flower pots has grown to become one of the largest diamondback terrapin hatcheries in the country at The Landings Club, the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News reported.
Founder Carolyn McInerney runs the Skidaway Audubon Diamondback Terrapin Project, which this year will incubate close to 2,000 eggs from the marsh turtles. Her backyard, which sits on hole number 3 of the club’s Plantation Golf Course overlooking a sea of lush marsh grass, is the project epicenter, the Morning News reported.
Terrapins, the only turtles that live in the salt marsh, are a species of concern in Georgia where they face drowning in crab pots and being crushed by cars as they plod across busy roads to lay their eggs. At The Landings, terrapins find sand traps an irresistible place to lay eggs. The bunkers are high and dry and easy to dig. But as McInerney noted years ago, eggs laid in sand traps are easy pickings for predators like raccoons and crows, the Morning News reported.
McInerney started rescuing eggs in 2004 and quickly paired with naturalist John “Crawfish” Crawford, a naturalist and educator at University of Georgia’s nearby Marine Education Center and Aquarium on Skidaway Island. Crawford advised her about protecting the nests and hatchlings and allowed her to operate under his wildlife permit, the Morning News reported.
Through trial and error, they figured out the methods that have led to their unprecedented success. Monitoring the eggs in the sand traps, they learned early on, spelled doom. They tried that, marking the nests so that the course keepers and golfers could avoid disturbing them, the Morning News reported.
“Carolyn found only one set of hatchling tracks all season,” Crawford wrote in a report. Now it’s an intense labor of love that keeps the eggs safe, and their numbers increasing. In 2010, 303 hatchlings were released; last year it was 1,851. McInerney blames construction on the golf course for dampening the expected continued surge this year, but numbers still look to be pretty close to the 2014 record, the Morning News reported.
Starting in late April and running through July, McInerney and volunteers Pattye Field, Peggy Miller and Kathryn McLearn scour sand traps for the tell-tale signs of terrapin nests. They carefully relocate the clutches they find, usually about eight eggs, to protected hatcheries. The eggs hatch in about 70-75 days. Along with the volunteers and Crawford, Skidaway Audubon Inc. and The Landings Plantation Golf Course maintenance staff cooperate on the project, with Skidaway Audubon funding it, the Morning News reported.
The hatcheries, which look like a raised garden bed with a screened lid, used to be built with an opening at one end to allow newly hatched turtles to release themselves. That proved problematic when crows learned to treat the boxes like terrapin vending machines. “The crows waited around and plucked them off as they came out,” Crawford said.
Now the hatcheries are completely enclosed, but equipped with sunken buckets the hatchlings tumble into for collection. It’s not only handy for the volunteers, but it keeps the hatchlings from tiring themselves or getting so frustrated they burrow back under the sand, the Morning News reported.
The project regularly invites local residents to assist in releasing the hatchlings. Last week, 50 of the day-old babies, each with its own uniquely patterned shell, squirmed in two Tupperware containers, raring to go. A crowd of about 30—mostly Landings neighbors—helped deposit the terrapins one by one at the edge of the nearby marsh, where thick marsh grass should provide enough cover for at least some of them to reach maturity. The hatchlings scrambled to freedom, the Morning News reported.
“They’ll live out here for three years in the high marsh until they’re big enough to handle the currents,” McInerney said.
When they mature in about six years they may be back to lay eggs in the same sand traps, just as she suspects has already played out, the Morning News reported.
“A lot of the females coming in now are ones that I’ve released,” she said.
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