Dan Rodricks: Rescued and randy, Maryland wood turtles get best revenge | STAFF COMMENTARY

One day in August 2018, conservation police officers in upstate New York busted a retired school teacher who had collected nearly 300 reptiles in his house. He had rare and threatened reptiles, reptiles poached from the wild, reptiles protected from humans by law.

At the time, the seizure was the largest of its kind in New York history, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

In all, officers rescued 292 critters.

We’re talking snakes, including three king cobras, one of which was 10 feet long.

We’re talking turtles — 17 bog turtles (federally designated as a threatened species), two box turtles, 28 Blanding’s turtles, two painted turtles, six snapping turtles, 184 spotted turtles and 53 wood turtles.

And not just any wood turtles.

Rare wood turtles from Maryland.

Officials had genetic information proving that some of the seized turtles had been taken from their natural habitats in the western part of our state.

Unfortunately, the charges against the reptile rogue were dismissed by a New York judge who ruled that prosecutors had not filed the indictment in the case in a timely manner.

But, on the fortunate side, wildlife officials had taken steps to deal humanely and wisely with the confiscated turtles; as much as possible, they wanted to return them to their native states.

So the Maryland wood turtles came back, though not to the western woods. They went instead to the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. Releasing them could have had a decimating effect on the remaining wild populations.

“There are disease risks when hundreds of turtles are housed privately,” says Kevin Barrett, the zoo’s curator of reptiles and amphibians. “They may appear healthy, but down the road, they might start sharing different illnesses.”

So the zoo made accommodations.

By now, the ones rescued from that New York collector have been there for more than two years. In a special room of tanks, pens and pipes, two males and four females are getting the best revenge — breeding and having babies, and several of their offspring already have been released to the wild.

The project began when the Maryland Department of Natural Resources asked the zoo to “head start” the turtles.

So far, the rescued adults have produced two clutches of eggs. Last year, the zoo, state and the Susquehannock Wildlife Society were able to place six young turtles into natural habitats. There’s one more turtle scheduled to be released this year, and I recently watched that youngster as he munched on a snack of tiny worms, sprinkled in front of him by Kat Mantzouris, the zoo’s conservation programs manager.

The staff carefully monitors the little one’s food consumption and weight so that he grows at a reasonably normal rate before being released. At 100 grams, a young wood turtle can better evade predators and survive. It can also bear the weight of a small transmitter installed on the turtle’s shell for tracking.

(The turtles rescued from New York were not the first to breed in captivity. In 2020, zoo veterinarians patched up a female turtle that had been hit by a car in western Maryland. They discovered that she was carrying eggs and, in time, her one hatchling became the first wood turtle the zoo released into the wild.)

As with a lot of animals, habitat loss is a challenge for the wood turtle. But so is poaching: Human beings (I supposed we still have to call them that) take turtles from stream valleys and wetlands and put them into the black market for collectors.

I did not know this was a thing in Maryland.

“Poaching is a significant threat to wood turtles,” says Beth Schlimm, a herpetologist with DNR’s Wildlife and Heritage Service. “This species is popular in the pet trade, and many are collected and sold illegally. In Maryland, it is illegal to collect wood turtles from the wild.”

Wood turtles are officially listed as “state rare” in Maryland, meaning they are “at high risk of extinction or extirpation due to restricted range, few populations or occurrences, steep declines, severe threats or other factors.” Nationally, the wood turtle is a candidate for federal listing under the Endangered Species Act.

The zoo says wood turtles are slow to reproduce and have high hatchling mortality. Fostering their “head start” at the zoo seems to make the best of a bad situation, and the early signs are encouraging. Given that wood turtles can live for four or five decades, the zoo might be running this breeding operation for a long time.

“But this is not the silver bullet to fixing things,” said Barrett. “Head starting is a nice way to buy us some time and reintroduce those genetics that were lost. But there are other factors, with poaching, degradation of habitat and invasive species. So [head starting] is one of the tools in our tool bag, but we need to develop a statewide plan because this is not a cure-all.”

In the meantime, if you’re out there in wild Maryland, in a forested area where there’s a stream or a creek or a fork or a prong, and you see a wood turtle, just stand back and admire it. Let me say this with a Bawlmer accent: “Leave that turtle Ay-loan!”