As a continuation of a project that began last year, this year’s turtle habitat monitoring project was updated to provide for the collection for more precise data collection and to better document habitat features for later use. This year, three teams of three or four members conducted the western pond turtle habitat surveys each Friday throughout the term.  These surveys were located in the Marcola, Fall Creek, and Dorena areas of Lane County.      

2007 Data Collection

            The team collected 134 aquatic habitat features and 25 upland habitat features as compared to 2006’s survey of 54 aquatic and 4 upland features.  Last year’s survey polygons stretched up to 500m from the stream, but this year they were limited to 250m from streams allowing for a more in-depth survey of the polygons.  In addition to the changes in survey locations and polygons, the team was also asked to photo-document each aquatic and upland habitat feature with one or more pictures for later reference.
            Overall, this year’s updated data collection methods helped to greatly improve the Bureau of Land Management’s data on the quality and quantity of potential western pond turtle habitat and was essential in helping the habitat monitoring team to provide recommendations for future restoration efforts.   

Field Trip

            For one field work day this term, the team visited Dave Vesely of the Oregon Wildlife Institute to learn about his ongoing pilot study of western pond turtle demographics at Scout Pond near Philomath, OR.  Dave’s study is concerned with learning about the demographics of Scout Pond’s turtle population, as well as improving species recruitment by tracking female turtles and employing nest cages to prevent predators from eating the turtle eggs from nests.     
           Here we observed turtle trapping techniques and the use of radio telemetry as well as how to tag turtles with telemetry transmitters, and measure, weigh, sex, and code them for identification purposes.  These methods will be used to allow Dave to infer the sex ratio, ages, and population size of the Scout Pond turtles.
           A surprising and relatively unused method that Dave is using to conduct his study is the use of dogs to track down newly laid nests which are almost invisible in the landscape once the female turtle leaves it.  Dave’s dog Chilco has been trained to pick up the scents of specific species and has become adept at finding new turtle nests.  When the nesting season begins, Chilco will be sent out in the mornings to find turtle nests so that they can be caged, in the attempts to improve recruitment for the area’s turtles.   
           This field trip was an opportunity for the team to observe western pond turtles up close and to learn about other restoration projects in the Willamette Valley.