Bog turtles are the tiniest turtle in North America, and also the most endangered, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering adding southern populations of Bog Turtles to the list of federally protected endangered species.
So I had to promise never to disclose our location, when I accompanied the biologists to watch as they set up camera traps.
Muddy water sloshed around our legs as we moves through tall grasses, beautiful swamp rose flowers, and a strong-smelling plant called swamp cabbage.
After an hour or two of setting traps, we spot a bog turtle nest, with four eggs—a rare discovery. The researchers are overjoyed. “I’ve never seen eggs,” said one of the surveyors, Amy Roberts.
“It makes me so excited. This is so beautiful,” said Elijah Thompson, a seasonal worker with the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy.
The news is also a shock to the landowner— he was completely unaware that bog turtles live on his property.
It’s uncommon to see a bog turtles, because they’re tiny and like to hide.
“Rarely even if you know there’s bog turtles in an area will you ever see one,” said Amy Roberts. She’s only seen a few, and she’s been researching them for years with the Conservation Management Institute at Virginia Tech.
Bog turtles are three or four inches long, and they have a big orange-reddish patch behind their eye as well, said Mike Knoerr, who was also surveying for the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy. “I think they’re beautiful.”
The bog turtle was in the headlines earlier this year after organizers of FloydFest announced they’d hit delays in the permitting process for their new property in Floyd County. They canceled this year’s music festival, and some people went on social media, blaming the bog turtle as the culprit.
In fact, the turtle had nothing to do with FloydFest’s postponement, said one of the festival’s organizers, Sam Calhoun.
“Harming anything is kind of the antithesis of FloydFest from the very beginning,” Calhoun said. “We’re doing everything by the book, so we can protect anything that needs to be protected.”
Even though they haven’t seen any bog turtles on their property, Calhoun said they’ve adjusted their construction plans to keep the wetlands untouched.
The main risks to bog turtles are their disappearing habitats, as housing developments and roads replace these bogs, and landowners ditch or drain the swamps. Over 90 percent of mountain bogs have disappeared across the southeast, said Knoerr.
Some estimates suggest bog turtles only have 500 acres of habitat left across the southeast, according to Will Harlan, with the Center for Biological Diversity. "It only exists in these mountain wetlands," Harlan said.
Floyd County actually has some of the best preserved wetlands for these turtles, according to State Herpetologist J.D. Kleopfer.
“It’s like the good lord took a pepper shaker and just shook out these little wetlands all over Floyd County,” Kleopfer said, adding that the type of wetland these turtles like best in Virginia is called a Fen.
Bog turtles have existed in the southern Appalachian mountains for at least 10,000 years, said Knoerr. They sell for big money on the black market, and poachers steal them.
In a month, the scientists will take the cameras back to their lab, where they’ll analyze thousands of photos, to see how many bog turtles, and other animals, they can spot. In three years, they hope to have a better sense of how many bog turtles still live in the mountains of Appalachia.
