In Massachusetts Classrooms, Students and Turtles Help Each Other
The school year has just begun, and Emilie Wilder, a field biologist and associate director of conservation engagement at the Boston area’s Zoo New England, is talking to a group of students. She explains the conservation challenges facing a handful of local turtle species, then describes what the students’ role in meeting those challenges will be. Whether she is speaking to elementary school students, middle school students, or high schoolers, the basic elements of her address are the same.
At the end of each presentation, and with all the drama of a sports announcer, Wilder asks the assembled students, “Are you ready to meet your turtles?”
As they get their first look at the turtles they will raise for the rest of the school year, the students cheer and clap. A few even shed tears of joy. The turtles, which Wilder has kept hidden until this dramatic reveal, are tiny – and cuter than you might expect. If they are Blanding’s turtles, they have googly eyes, bright yellow chins and necks, and permanent grins.
Since 2009, some 22,000 students in eastern Massachusetts have helped raise more than 1,700 turtle hatchlings. Zoo New England’s Hatchling and Turtle Conservation through Headstarting (HATCH) program provides the turtles to classrooms with the goal of conserving four local turtle species: state threatened Blanding’s turtles, wood turtles (state listed as “special concern”), spotted turtles (listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources), and the more common snapping turtles.
Over the years, students have named the turtles in their care Bubbles (25 of them), Bubble (4 of them), Bubba (2), and Captain Bubbles. There have also been Squirtle (25), Yertle, and Gamera, as well as hatchlings named after each of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, including 6 Michelangelos. Other monikers include the inevitable Shelly (12) and Shelldon (6), as well as the baffling Shish Kebob. And because this is the Boston area, there are Gronk, Brady, Big Papi, and Dunkin.
Wilder and the other Zoo New England field biologists who give the presentations across dozens of regional schools make sure students know that by raising these turtles in aquariums in their classrooms for the school year, they are making a real difference for some animals that can use the help.
Counting Turtles
Around the world, turtles are in trouble, with about half of all species under a threat of extinction, according to the Turtle Survival Alliance, a global conservation organization. Common hazards include habitat loss, climate change, and wildlife trafficking. Freshwater turtles in the Northeast, including Blanding’s turtles, wood turtles, and spotted turtles, face similar dangers. Hatchlings, small and still soft-shelled, are easy targets for predators from bullfrogs to chipmunks to raccoons. Cars hit turtles as they cross roads built between the wetlands where the turtles spend most of their lives and the open spaces where females lay eggs. Turtles illegally collected as pets often live short lives and can’t contribute offspring to wild populations.
In 2003, conservation biologist Bryan Windmiller was running an environmental consulting firm specializing in Massachusetts’ protected species regulations. He suspected that the number of Blanding’s turtles in Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge near his home had declined. Scientists had surveyed the refuge in the early 1970s and calculated there were 135 Blanding’s turtles there, but no one had counted the turtles since.
Windmiller’s firm received funding from the Town of Concord, Massachusetts, and the Concord Land Conservation Trust (CLCT), a local land trust, to do a new population survey.
The range of Blanding’s turtles includes the upper Midwest, New York, New England, and Nova Scotia. In Massachusetts, the turtle’s location in wetlands near and inside the I-495 beltway – the highly developed region that surrounds Boston – and its disconnected populations make it a conservation priority. The species is especially susceptible to habitat loss, and females may travel more than a mile each spring to seek suitable areas for laying eggs, increasing their road-kill risk.
Windmiller and his team counted about 60 turtles in 2003, less than half of the 1970s tally. Most of the female turtles they found had been marked as part of the 1970s count, making them 50 or more years old. Alarmingly, the new count didn’t find many younger turtles, indicating there was not a healthy population of turtles approaching breeding age, which in Blanding’s turtles starts in their late teens. Without young turtles to grow into mature, breeding turtles, the population would, over decades, disappear.
Later that year, Windmiller received a permit from the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife) to headstart Blanding’s turtles, meaning his team would collect hatchlings from the wild and raise them in a protected environment until they outgrew their vulnerability to most predators and had better odds of surviving in their natural habitat. Zoo New England and New England Aquarium in Boston volunteered to raise 10 hatchlings each. But Windmiller estimated the Great Meadows population would need at least 70 headstarted turtles a year to recover. He needed more help.
Inspiration came from an existing turtle headstarting program run by MassWildlife. Classrooms were already raising red-bellied cooters, a state endangered species.
Windmiller made an offer to his children’s teachers in Concord: he would provide hatchlings and educational classroom programs if the classes would feed and care for the turtles through the school year. Come springtime, the children would help biologists release these growing turtles back to the wild.
Susan Erickson, then a fourth grade teacher in Concord, was thrilled with the addition to her classroom of two turtles in a tank. “It was incredible for my students,” she said. The children learned that while many of the endangered animals they’ve heard of, such as tigers and elephants, live far away, some of the animals living in their own towns were also struggling. It was the students’ job to help these turtles.
Erickson emphasized to her students that the turtles were not classroom pets and that keeping them required a permit from the state. “They are on loan from nature for us to get them more robust,” she told her classes. The students were inspired by the hands-on work of feeding the turtles, measuring and weighing each turtle weekly, and recording their growth. They even volunteered to clean the turtles’ tank.
By 2009, classrooms in Carlyle, Andover, Sudbury, and Concord all wanted turtles. “Over the next few years, the headstarting program grew to over 20 different schools,” Windmiller said. “That was my capacity to handle presentations.”
In 2012, he founded a nonprofit organization, Grassroots Wildlife Conservation, with Erickson on its board of directors. The organization hired Emilie Wilder the next year. Grassroots Wildlife Conservation merged with Zoo New England in 2017, becoming the zoo’s field conservation department. So many classrooms are eager to raise turtles that HATCH has expanded to include wood turtles, spotted turtles, and snapping turtles.
The turtle headstarting programs are just one part of a larger conservation plan for the state’s at-risk turtles, said Michael Jones, state herpetologist for MassWildlife. For example, he said, for Blanding’s turtles, MassWildlife works with four other states (New Hampshire, Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania) to identify locations with “the largest, most resilient, and representative Blanding’s turtle sites.” It then collaborates with local governments and land trusts to conserve those regionally significant sites and to keep an eye on the turtle populations there. On the list of 36 sites, 9 are in Massachusetts. MassWildlife is also working with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to keep turtles off the road by steering them under bridges and through culverts, and they’ve put up road signs to warn drivers at places where turtles frequently cross the road.
A Safe Start
In July 2015, Wilder found herself in a field at 2:30 in the morning, waiting for a Blanding’s turtle to finish laying her eggs. Most Blanding’s turtles nest in May or June, so this turtle was already running late. Wilder’s vigil had begun late that afternoon. The turtle had been repeatedly spooked by neighborhood noises such as children playing and cars going by. This made digging its nest excruciatingly slow, even by turtle standards.
Wilder waited for hours in the dark before she decided to go home and come back after the sun rose to cover the nest with mesh. She was in the process of making a mental map of the spot so she could return, noting a nearby bush and how far away it was from the nest, when she saw it: “There was a raccoon hiding in the bushes, waiting for the turtle to lay its eggs.”
She knew that once the turtle finished her work, the raccoon would feast, so Wilder stayed where she was. Eventually, the turtle laid the last egg and refilled the nest hole. Wilder covered the nest. The raccoon left. And Wilder went home around 3:30 in the morning.
The HATCH program’s process for collecting and raising hatchlings is intensive. It begins when field biologists put a radio tag on a breeding-age female turtle. (They also tag male turtles for data collection purposes.) The radio tag allows biologists to track the turtle when she leaves the wetland and heads to a drier place upland to dig a nest and lay her eggs. Wilder or one of her colleagues stands by while the turtle does this, and afterward, the biologist covers the nest with wire mesh to deter digging animals, such as raccoons, skunks, and foxes, which will unearth and eat turtle eggs.
A HATCH team member visits the nest every day until the nestlings hatch in August or early September. Then they collect the hatchling turtles, soft-shelled and slightly larger than a quarter, and bring them to the zoo.
For the next few weeks, field biologists feed and care for the tiny turtles. These turtles are lucky. (In fact, three of them have been named Lucky.) They are raised initially at the zoo, in part, Wilder said, to monitor turtles for signs of fatal genetic conditions and to avoid assigning those hatchlings to classrooms. This arrangement is also a simple matter of scheduling, because most of the turtles hatch before school starts.
From Small to Mighty
While everyone on the Zoo New England team describes the baby turtles relative to a coin – “slightly larger than a quarter” – the students often think of the hatchlings’ size differently. They have named the turtles Oreo (6 times), Cookie (3), and Cookies. During the 2009–2010 school year, students at Carlisle School dubbed a male Blanding’s turtle Chubby Oreo. In 2024, Chubby Oreo became the first HATCH turtle known to have mated.
Male Blanding’s turtles may start mating around age 15, and females around 18. Turtles of each species included in the HATCH program have been documented to live 50 years in the wild, and some may live to be 70 years or older. These species all reach sexual maturity in their teens.
One of the early advantages for the young HATCH turtles, as opposed to their kin living in the wild, is that they do not face the risk of predators or have to build up calorie reserves sufficient for lasting through a winter of brumatation, the reptilian version of hibernation. HATCH program turtles remain warm in their classrooms and active through winter. Students feed the hatchlings commercial turtle chow, which looks like dog or cat kibble but contains all the nutrients a turtle needs to grow and harden its shell.
As students collect data, they see the turtles’ remarkable growth during the course of the school year. Blanding’s turtles arrive in classrooms weighing an average of 10 grams, about the weight of two nickels. By spring, they weigh an average of 14 times more – 143 grams, about the same as a baseball or a D battery. The goal is for each turtle to weigh 75 grams before release, but many classrooms exceed that, said Matthew Kamm, associate director of field conservation at Zoo New England. At the end of the school year, some of the HATCH Blanding’s turtles weigh more than 200 grams, or 20 times their starting weight. The other species experience similar gains, growing to a size and weight over the course of nine months that would have taken years to achieve in the wild.
Lasting Impacts
Two decades after Bryan Windmiller’s team counted only 60 Blanding’s turtles in Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, there are now about 300. Biologists have released HATCH turtles in waterways adjacent to the main Blanding’s habitat there, and they are researching the possibility of reintroducing the species to nearby habitats it hasn’t occupied for decades.
The program has a lasting impact on the students as well. One student returned to teach in the high school program where she helped raise turtles as a student. Several of Erickson’s former students have gone on to study and work in science-related fields. “They talk about the turtles as being instrumental to that,” she said.
In late spring, near the end of the school year, students join Zoo New England biologists on a field trip to a wetland near their school to release the turtles. Many of the students have not spent much – or any – time in these wetlands, and the field trips offer a chance to experience the local habitat firsthand.
Sometimes during these outings, Wilder will pick up a snake and hold it carefully for children to see and touch. (“Gently, with just one finger,” Wilder coaches.) The excursions provide a new and deeper connection to a place that is close to home for all the students.
Once the students and biologists have arrived at the release spot, one or two of the zoo’s wildlife biologists – and sometimes a teacher – wade into the wetland with the turtles in a plastic tub, tipping it gently to allow the turtles to enter the water. The children yell after them: “Good luck! Be safe!” And, just as they did when Wilder first explained the HATCH program to them, some of the students shed tears.
The turtles they release may be named Bubbles or Shelley or Michelangelo – or Turbo, Nugget, Speedy, or Dribble. And as they swim away from the children who named them, fed them, and cared about them for an entire school year, the turtles are home.