The little-seen littlest turtle in Virginia loves a good dive in the mud.
A bog turtle leads a quiet life. But if all goes well, that life is a long one, measured in decades rather than years; given considerable luck and the right conditions, a bog turtle can live 40 years and possibly even longer. That’s some impressive staying power for a reptile that at full adult growth packs the approximate size and heft of a deck of cards.
Bog turtles are, in fact, North America’s smallest native turtle, and one of its more elusive, as well—particularly in Virginia. According to John Kleopfer, state herpetologist with Virginia’s Department of Wildlife Resources, in Virginia the turtles have been found only in a handful of counties along the southern Blue Ridge. But it turns out that even when you know where to look for them, actually locating them is no easy matter.
As their name suggests, these turtles prefer a boggy habitat—and by “boggy,” think of sinking to your knees in a deep squelching ooze. Dr. Carola Haas, a professor in the department of fish and wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech who has been studying the turtles for several decades, says that a sunny, open, meadow wetland with a high water table that remains consistent year-round seems to ideally suit a bog turtle. The turtles spend much of their “active” lives burrowed into the soft muck, which helps them both evade predators and stay cool in the hot summer months. “They really spend most of their life underground,” says Haas.
Which means that if you’re a bog turtle researcher in search of some bog turtles to research—well, good luck with that. “It takes so much effort to find a bog turtle,” says Haas, who describes one survey expedition when a team of six experienced bog-turtle finders spent four days at a site known to support a population of dozens of turtles, and for three of the days nobody found a single one.
When turtle surveying, the preferred strategy is to gently probe the mud with a stick until you hit something solid. At first, says Haas, you get excited at every rock and root you thunk upon, but eventually “you get to learn the sound or the feel of a turtle.”
And then you reach in the muck and try to grab it—keeping in mind, however, that as it happens, snapping turtles like hanging out down there too. “I usually make a little circle with the probe first to find out how big it is,” says Haas.
Yet despite their generally retiring habits, bog turtles have revealed themselves to have a more intrepid side as well. Radio-telemetry tracking has demonstrated that these bagel-sized reptiles can cover some serious distance. “We have had turtles move a few miles. We have had them cross over a 3,000-foot mountain gap,” says Kleopfer. And even when they don’t stray far, they might still manage to cover as much as 80 meters in a day simply meandering about their home bog.
Haas believes that with their long lifespans, the turtles might have actually adapted to move about a landscape of interconnected wetlands to find new habitats as conditions naturally changed across decades. But as land use practices have fractured and degraded some of those wetlands, now the turtles are increasingly confined to fewer and more limited habitats. And while bog turtles are a protected, endangered species in Virginia, their very longevity makes them particularly vulnerable as a species.
They are slow to reach reproductive maturity at somewhere between five and eight years or even later, in part because for much of the year they exist in low-metabolism states of slow growth, hibernating from early fall through late spring and, in the hot dry height of summer, often entering a semi-dormant state known as “aestivation.” Females lay a small clutch of typically between one and six eggs in early summer that hatch in late summer—if they aren’t consumed first by predators. With limited population numbers and slow growth, therefore, losing even a few reproductively mature adults could be “catastrophic,” as Kleopfer puts it, for the species’ continued survival in Virginia.
Kleopfer acknowledges that for some, the long-term survival of a diminutive turtle species might seem insignificant compared to more pressing global issues. “People say, ‘What good is a turtle?’” he says.
His answer is that it’s about the turtle, yes, but it’s also about much more than a turtle. “It’s all part of our natural heritage of the state,” he says, and we are stewards with the responsibility to preserve this gift. “We are protecting this legacy,” says Kleopfer, “for future generations.”
This article originally appeared in the December 2020 issue of Virginia Living magazine.
