In this account I describe my field work with turtles, their ecology and habitats, along with notes on my process. I discuss some key investigations in detail, such as a tracking study on the nest-to-water migrations of hatchling wood turtles.
Another extended focus of the notebooks, interwoven through my years of keeping records, is my campaign to have the ecosystem that is the epicenter of my observations and experiences, an extensive mosaic of wetlands, riparian and upland habitats I call “The Digs”, home to three turtle species considered “at risk” to endangered throughout their natural ranges, receive the greatest degree of preservation possible.
I discuss this complicated, arduous, and I can add remarkable, history of over three decades in a section entitled “Courser Farm Easements”, below.
Among my archival papers are numerous accounts of the many involvements, case histories if you will, I have had with my advocacy for going beyond conservation to preservation. That is to say, setting aside significant acreage habitats of demonstrated high ecological value, supporting endangered species, plants, animals, and beyond, and assuring the persistence of biodiversity. By “setting aside” I mean closing to public access. I continue to speak to this, although the objective has proven impossible to achieve.
The Digs account is followed by background on two other key sets of notebooks from two very different venues: “Tupper Hill” and the “Lamprey River”. Taken together these notebooks and related documentation form a voluminous documentation that is of enormous substance and importance to my core archive.
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Digs Notebooks – History and Content Summary.
For fifteen years after discovering the extensive, ecologically rich, habitat mosaic I came to call “the Digs”, I kept the rounds of the turtle season much in the manner of my wanderings and observations in boyhood. “Being there” was enough, the foundation of seemingly endless hours.
But in 1986 I began to make drawings of the patterns of spots on the carapaces of spotted turtles, as a means by which I could identify individuals. That awakened a keen desire to keep notebooks. In the spring of 1987 I began to record turtles, and detail my observations of their activities and habitats. With rare exceptions, I wrote in rather understated 7” x 5” Mead Spiral Bound, 1-Subject, College-Ruled Notebooks. They fit perfectly into a pocket of my swamp vest.
These notebooks have been my standard journal for documentation for 35 years, and ongoing.
My central suite of data included drawing individual identifying markings for each spotted turtle, Clemmys guttata, I captured. In time this expanded to include wood turtles, Glyptemys insculpta, and Blanding’s turtles Emydoidea blandingii. Taken together, these three species continue to constitute the center from which my naturalist observations and experiences emerge.
Over the time of my naturalist studies, due to increasing awareness of sharp declines in and extirpations of populations of all three species, they were accorded various designations, ranging from “sensitive” to “at risk”; “of special concern”; “threatened’; and “endangered” throughout their respective ranges.
It is an ironic, and of course troubling happenstance that the turtles I had undertaken to document arrived at sharing this fate. To have lived with the disappearances of the turtles and their historic landscapes has been a constant source of anger, and profound sense of loss that I have carried with me in seeking new, as yet not overrun and marginalized habitats.
Young spotted turtle and calipers on page of a temporary notebook.
With my first identification drawings, and documentations of the habitat and other details of the seasonal scenario in which I found each turtle, I started out on a path the duration of which I could never have envisioned.
A favorite Chinese saying of mine states that a great journey begins with a single step. I continue that journey.
These drawings allowed the identification of individual turtles if and when I encountered them over the years. The arrangements of the brilliant yellow spots on shadowy blue-black shells, constellations that were one of the things that led to my original bonding with spotted turtles, are unique with each individual once he or she has reached adulthood, at around fifteen to twenty years of age. They remain unchanged from that time on.
Hatchling wood turtle on a notebook page, with drawing of carapace anomaly.
This mark-and-recapture practice is the foundation of my field work and has led to my documentation of some individuals who are at least in their fifties, and living on. It is virtually impossible to determine the age of an adult by counting the annuli, the yearly growth rings on their plastrons, as the ridges that mark the end of each year’s growth (there is a similarity with tree rings) become extremely fine and crowded, until no more are added.
These bottom shells can also become smooth and worn from age and abrasion, so that annual increments become impossible to read or no longer show. Therefore it is standard practice to regard such individuals as being at least twenty years old, which is all but invariably an underestimate.
Therefore on the occasions in which I find a turtle thirty years after first entering him or her as an adult in one of my early notebooks, the turtle is considered to be at least fifty years old.
This could be a very conservative estimate, as the turtle could be several decades older. Female spotted turtles have been documented as living to the age of one hundred and ten.
Younger spotted turtles, whose annuli can be counted with accuracy. This provides a base from which his or her age can be determined if the turtle is found many years later. Since the carapace patterns of subadults change over the years, I make sketches of the spots on their heads and, if there are any spots present, tails. In addition I record anything else, such as an injury caused by a predator, that might be distinctive and unchanging.
Notebook with field sketch: wood turtle basking under cover.
When I find wood turtles and the infrequently encountered Blandings turtles I have to use a different scheme to record identities. As they lack the distinctive, easily readable markings of the spotted turtles, I distinguish the identities of adults by way of drawings of plastron patterns – black blotches rather like ink blots that usually showed at least one unique configuration.
I also use mechanical or predator related injuries on their shells, missing feet or limbs, and irregular patterns in the arrangement of their carapace plates (scutes). In 1993 I decided to employ a less complicated, more easily readable notching scheme by which I could track identities. I discuss this below.
In addition to identification drawings, I record the date and time of each capture and recapture; the activity of the turtle at the time of the sighting (basking, foraging, migrating, mating, resting, hiding under cover, etc.). In addition I describe the sites in which I find them, with detailed habitat descriptions, placing an emphasis on plant associations.
The botanical makeup of a habitat block, or even micro-niche, whether aquatic or terrestrial, provides significant clues for me to go by in finding turtles. I occasionally draw a plant, or habitat associations of them, in a notebook. But essentially all of my botanical studies are done in sketches and more complete pencil drawings and watercolors on separate sheets of paper, sometimes in sketchbooks.
I have done at least several hundred of these. They overlap with the artist component of my archive, as revered subjects in my oeuvre as artist as well as naturalist.
I take measurements of nearly all turtles, obtaining information on growth in the wild with those I find as juveniles, subadults, and eventually again as adults. My records of growth in wild, free-living individuals are especially comprehensive with wood turtles, as I commonly encounter all age classes. It is exceptionally difficult to find juvenile or subadult spotted and Blanding’s turtles.
As noted above, in 1993 I decided to make a significant change in my way of recording the identities of turtles. It had been in my mind throughout earlier years to use a system of notches on the marginal scutes of their carapaces.
The all but universal arrangement is twelve marginals on each side of the carapace. There are very infrequent anomalies of eleven or thirteen on one or both sides, which I add to the recording of identifications.
Each marginal is assigned a number value which can be determined by way of a small, non-invasive, but persistent notch made with a triangular file. Such a notch can be seen in the photo of the young spotted turtle on a notebook page, above. Notching various marginals can yield a number code unique to each turtle.
This method, devised by a researcher named Cagle in 1939, has been used by herpetologists for decades. It is still in use, although among many other technological advances in field studies there are small, equally non- invasive implants that can be inserted under the skin, and read like a bar code.
I had hesitated to adopt the notching scheme for years, as, for a host of reasons, I was never certain how long I would be able to continue my yearly studies of these turtles. As relatively non-invasive as this practice is – and it needs to be done but once – I did not want to notch them and then not be able follow up with long-term observations.
This decision to notch was finally precipitated by my welcoming Sheila Tuttle to conduct her MS thesis with wood turtles in my central wood turtle area. In order for her to identify turtles from my drawings she had to go through my many drawings, as though going through a file of finger prints.
This was of course difficult and time-consuming.
She undertook a year-long radio-tracking study, which allowed numerous periodic documentation of turtles’ locations throughout the season. This added a layer of extremely valuable information on the seasonal behavior that could not be determined otherwise, such as daily movements, complete mappings of habitat use and home ranges of each individual, and even locations of individuals in two ice-covered brooks in the heart of a New Hampshire winter.
Each turtle who carried a transmitter (out of a total of twelve) had an individual radio signal by which he or she could be identified from a distance, without being seen.
The only other time I had access to such technology was with my Lamprey River investigations (detailed below), where I had highly qualified graduate students from the University of New Hampshire assist me in conducting radio-tracking of wood and Blanding’s turtles in several key sites.
I support the advances in technology without reservation, and benefit from access to the radio-tracking data in the scientific literature and the many personal observations shared with me by colleagues conducting studies with my focus species in other parts of their ranges.
But I continue in my nineteenth (eighteenth? seventeenth?) wandering, observing, naturalist fashion. It suits my long-imbedded way of looking, and also adds revealing information seen through another lens.
My observing and experiencing as naturalist, centered on my primary devotion to “being there”, informs me as artist and writer; and my art and writing inform me as naturalist.
I have often been told that the primary value of my notebooks and reports, comes from the fact that it is a long-term study conducted by one person in one place.
I spent considerable time in the field with Sheila (I served as one of her advisors) part of nearly every day, as she conducted her masterful, deeply dedicated and supremely thorough thesis study. It was on a PhD level, in my estimation.
I went about my usual way with the wood turtles as she did her radio-tracking, with periods of meeting and discussions. At times I teamed with her on such aspects as identifying the plants in different habitat compartments.
A grand finale for the collaboration came about due to her determination to add a hatchling-tracking study to her thesis. This entailed tracing their nest-to-water journeys. Modern technology would have been of great benefit here, as transmitters small enough to attach to hatchling turtles, with a battery life of many months to a year, have been developed.
But our only option was to employ a methodology used in tracing the movements of nocturnal mammals and lizards, via using fluorescent powders and a black light.
We screened nests to protect them from predators, resulting in our having fifty four hatchlings to work with. We gave them individual identification numbers by applying a dab of fingernail polish on combinations of their minute marginals. Then we dusted them with the powders as they hatched and released them at their nest sites.
After dark we went out to attempt to track their trails, each of us taking a separate cohort. Unlike the fur of the mammals or scales of lizards who were studied in this manner, the shells of the little turtles held very little powder, and their tiny legs and leg pockets did not take on much more.
We flagged the sites in which they hid for the night, then returned in the morning to dust them again, and repeated the night-time tracking.
It was a decided challenge to follow the trails, which after a few feet to several yards or so were reduced to widely spaced brightly colored flecks. This was in thick hayfield grass and bordering vegetation, often requiring us to crawl on hands and knees through brambles and other heavy cover.
We tracked routes for varying distances, and managed to follow a dozen trails all the way to where they eventually found their ways to, and entered, one of the two brooks in which they would spend the winter. Only three turtles completed the migration the journey on the day that they had set off from their nests.
Others traveled for days to over a week. The champion wanderer took twenty six days. We lost this one for three days, but in some daytime scouting I found him again. He was on a hayfield slope that descended to one of the brooks.
I sensed strongly that he was on the final leg of his great journey, and called to Sheila to have her join me. We followed behind at a little distance. Driven by migratory intent, the hatchling paid no attention to us. We had the remarkable experience of witnessing him drop into the brook, his overwintering destination, on noon of that twenty sixth day.
The use of the florescent powder technique enabled us to map actual sections of routes of varying lengths taken by the orienteering turtles. This is not revealed by radio-tracking, which provides points here and there.
Our paper on this study was published in a peer-reviewed journal, one of the key contributions that my work has made to the literature to date, in this case as co-author.
For a number of years I conducted investigations into nesting and hatching of nests primarily by painted turtles, which are far more numerous than spotted and wood turtles, but with a meaningful sample of these and a number of snapping turtles.
I documented nest sites; their habitat natures; the number of eggs in clutches; dates of nesting and hatching for each nest. This included data on the overwintering in the nest and emergence from the nest the following spring by hatchling painted turtles.
Hatchlings of all the other species must dig out from the nest in late summer or autumn and migrate to aquatic hibernation sites suitable for their species, in order to survive the winter. For wood turtles overwintering must take place in the flowing water of streams or rivers; all others overwinter in still-water wetlands.
Due to weather conditions, insects (primarily mosquitoes, black flies, and deer flies – over the years ticks have become an increasing menace); and my constant intense focus on, and my need for time in the searching, I rarely did sketches in the notebooks themselves.
I worked up rough sketches and detailed pencil and watercolor in sketchbooks back in my home studio. My “Swamp Sketchbook” page details the major work I did in this mode, most of that during the years I was writing and illustrating The Year of the Turtle.
I would keep a turtle for a day for such studies, and also collected plants. I used photos and drew from memory and imagination, some more as naturalist, others as artist. A great many of these served as references for the art I produced to illustrate my published works.
A substantial number of my watercolors feature turtles, most commonly spotted turtles, in my “art as art”, that is to say not done to be used as illustrations for text. Examples appear in the artist component of my archive content.
I note ecological considerations that arise from observations and experience. The notebooks are richly interspersed with thoughts on what I observe, and questions constantly evoked by the finding of a turtle, or a view of the turtles’ relation to habitats, as well as reaction to habitat changes over time, due to influences such as plant succession, beaver activity, agricultural and other human alteration of natural landscapes.
Throughout the Digs notebooks there are many passages, vignettes, written sketches of moods, thoughts and images that come spontaneously to mind as I wander the places of the turtles. These interludes provide material for the creative-writing elements of my published books and personal journals.
Courser Farm Easements
I compiled a fifty page, two-map report showing every site in which I found any of the three target species – their seasonal activity centers, nesting and overwintering sites; nursery habitat for juveniles; and migration routes.
Papers in this voluminous file include updated reports and considerable correspondence, in addition to notes of meetings I had with agencies as I pursued my forty year campaign to have the entire Digs ecosystem put into conservation easements. It was an exceedingly trying and all-consuming undertaking that for years appeared to have no chance for success.
The matter of conservation easements was finally realized, with explicit acknowledgment that my decades of work with the turtles of “special concern” were the basis for the project being “put on the radar” and eventually being funded. Many agencies became involved in this lengthy process. In my quest I worked primarily in close contact with the Nature Conservancy; The Ausbon Sargent Land Protection Trust; New Hampshire’s Nongame and Endangered Species program; and the landowning family.
I did not ask for, nor did I ever receive any funding for any aspect of this mission. My agenda is ongoing, in that I continue to advocate strongly for the sine qua non of true protection for these steadily declining turtle species – the exclusion of public access from their critically requisite, ecosystem-wide habitat complexes. My mantra of moving beyond conservation to preservation inevitably fails to become implemented.
But in recent years habitat concerns have begun to be addressed, with my report and constant personal input as guides. The turtles have increasingly been recognized as the bedrock of the any conservation, and hopefully one day, preservation considerations.
Lamprey River Notes
There are separate notebooks, in addition to many notes interspersed among my Digs notebooks, from my tenure with the “Lamprey River Wild and Scenic River Study”. The Lamprey River Advisory Committee’s Wildlife Subcommittee contracted me to conduct studies of spotted, wood, and Blanding’s turtles along designated the twenty six and a half mile reach of the river, as an aspect of this federal program, under the aegis of The National Park Service.
My study was extended to research on behalf of the U.S Environmental Protection Agency to include investigations of adjacent habitats for these “species of concern” not within the footprint of the river study proper. Three towns along the river in New Hampshire (Epping, Durham, and Newmarket) voted to accept studies for the eventual implementation of protective regulations.
This was the first river to be so designated in the state. Due to strong anti-government sentiments in the “Property Rights” agenda deeply prevalent in new Hampshire, the Lamprey remains the sole river to have been accepted for a “Wild and Scenic River” designation by towns in the state.
My being sought out for this research afforded me an exceptionally rare opportunity to have paying field work with turtles. (The other was with the Norcross’ Sanctuary, Tupper Hill, in Monson and Wales, Massachusetts, detailed below in my account of the Sanctuary Notebooks.)
My charge was to find viable populations of the three turtle species along the river’s study corridor, document the locus and habitat nature of any populations, evaluate their ecological parameters, and make recommendations for their protection.
In addition to my notebooks there is numerous supporting documentation stemming from my observations and studies in the form of reports and correspondence throughout my field work.
There are two videos of me walking along the river, with my comments and perceptions ecological considerations, and concerns relative to the protection of turtle populations and the riverine ecosystem as a whole. These have been posted on YouTube.
d.In the closing credits there is a disclaimer from agencies involved in the designation study that the views expressed in the videos do not necessarily the views of the agencies themselves. I am grateful for having been given the podium, so to speak – and flattered
Copious documentation, observations of turtles in habitats associated with a river and its floodplains, with which I previously had not had extensive experience (my knowledge of wood turtles in riverine corridors was in particular greatly expanded), reports and recommendations, notes for talks and various presentations exist in ancillary papers.
My final map report, which showed every site in which I had found each of the the three turtle species, was accompanied by site-specific ecological and conservation/ preservation considerations..
My work on behalf of the river receiving the “Wild and Scenic” designation was acknowledged with a “Hero for the Lamprey River” award from the Lamprey River Advisory Committee; and an “Environmental Merit Award” for the USEPA, the latter in a ceremony at Faneuil Hall in Boston.
Sanctuary Notebooks… Tupper Hill, the Norcross Wildlife Foundation Sanctuary.
From April of 1984 to April 1987 I had a tenure as Visiting Artist-Naturalist at Tupper Hill, the Norcross Wildlife Foundation’s wildlife sanctuary in Monson and Wales, Massachusetts. I was contracted to document state-listed amphibians and reptiles that were known to be, or might be found to be, resident on the sanctuary’s holdings of 4,500 acres.
Tupper Hill is a true sanctuary, restricting all public access. Thus I had the experience of witnessing a wild landscape that had been left utterly to itself for half a century. I know of no other such place. It had the essential value for me of being able to intimately come to know an entire ecosystem complex free of the presence of people and their invariably accompanying dogs and activities.
The experience added an incomparable picture for me to go by in my advocacy, via my published writings, talks, seminars, keynotes et.al. over the years, to leave exemplary ecosystems supporting biodiversity entirely alone. I do support places for people to go, Trust for Public Lands and such – but where do we not go?
I went to the Sanctuary for three-day field visits once a month. I stayed in a not exactly Thoreauvian cabin on the border of the no-access acreage.
This led to my working with spotted and wood turtles, but also amphibians: spotted, marbled, and four-toed salamanders. I identified and inventoried fifty or so vernal pool habitats. These critical and highly threatened habitats hold regulatory protection under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act (MESA) analogous to those accorded the turtles and salamanders.
I found the exquisitely marked marbled salamander, a vernal pool obligate species native to New Hampshire only in a few sites on its border with Massachusetts to be present in encouraging numbers. The opportunity to investigate a species new to me was a major highlight of this extraordinary experience in my naturalist field work.
I wrote reports for the Sanctuary directors and board members, saving my drafts, and kept a separate set of seventeen notebooks. Taken together, they are an important and unique component of my archive.
Many reflections on preservation vs. conservation, the nature of nature left to nature, new insights into the species and their habitats I investigated in such a landscape – one markedly different from my Digs surroundings – are interspersed among my documentations.
The habitats, set in the eastern hill region of Massachusetts (elevations on the order of 800’- 900’; extensive oak-hickory forest; rocky cascades of streams, perched wetlands, e.g.) also differed greatly in nature from the level, low-elevation (ca. 400-450’) acreage of the Digs, are also discussed.
One deeply rewarding outcome of my work was discovering and having the Sanctuary director and board purchase, as an addition to Tupper Hill, a one hundred farm acre parcel abutting the Sanctuary that featured a mile of stream and riparian habitat that was critical to a fairly robust population of wood turtles.
There had been several sightings of these turtles on the sanctuary property, but I determined that there was no stream corridor that could support, and hence preserve, the population within the Sanctuary’s boundaries.
I strongly recommended that the Foundation acquire this property, emphasizing that it would give the sanctuary another state-listed species to its absolutely protective holdings.
This was effected during my tenure, a deeply gratifying and rare experience for me in my arena of seeking as secure a preservation status for a turtle species as I could imagine.
I detail this history in the “Tupper Hill” chapter of my Self-Portrait With Turtles.
My Five Published Books
Trout Reflections
Following the Water
Year of the Turtle
Self-Portrait With Turtles, A Memoir
Swampwalker’s Journal
Hand Bound Books
A Book of a Number of Hours
A Book of Winter Buds
A Book of Winter Branches
Borradores
Landscapes – January 20, 1978 – April 1978
Variations: February 1, 1967 – August 1, 1968
Visions: Drawings and Paintings: 1976 – 1988
Exhibitions
“Seldom Seen” Exhibition at the Davidow Center
“Beyond Words” Exhibition at the Currier Museum
Galleries
“Seldom Seen” Gallery
David’s Wildlife Studies Sketchbook
Virtual Gallery of Art Produced for My Five Books
“Regarding Women Regarding…” Introduction
Sketchbook Gallery: 4/1/1985 – 10/14/1987
Swamp Sketchbook
The Swamp Dialogs
Drawings and Watercolors Produced to Illustrate my Published Books
CODIT – Compartmentalization of Decay in Trees